Service management has evolved significantly over the past three decades. What once focused primarily on resolving issues and keeping IT services running has gradually shifted towards proactive support, customer experience, and delivering greater value to the business.
In this edition of Humans of Support, we speak with Ian Clark, a Service Management and Customer Experience specialist with over 30 years of industry experience. An internationally certified ITIL Master and partner at Fox IT Service Management, Ian has worked with organisations across South Africa, Europe, and the UK, helping them improve their service management practices and customer experiences.
In this conversation, Ian shares his perspective on the introduction of ITIL 5, the changing role of service management, the evolution of support over three decades, and why ownership and accountability remain essential to successful service management.
ITIL 4 has been around for several years now. From what you’re seeing in the industry, what has actually changed from ITIL 4 to ITIL 5?
Customer experience management and the product and service lifecycle are receiving greater attention in ITIL 5. These are two areas that are particularly resonating with organisations and MSPs.
Ian Clark, Partner, FoxITSM
ITIL 5 has only been around for approximately 12 months now. There are many companies in South Africa, and I also deal with a lot of European and UK companies. A lot of what people have put in place is good quality, and it still remains.
With ITIL 5, I’ve specifically seen a big interest in the customer experience angle. ITIL 5 has a whole new course, certification, and actual guidance around experience management. So there’s a lot of interest in that.
There’s certainly a lot of interest in what we term the product and service lifecycle. It’s been reintroduced more prominently in ITIL 5, thankfully.
I’ve been running Foundation courses for the last few weeks with various MSPs, and those are the two areas that seem to resonate the most in terms of their interest. I think these are the challenges going forward and what people are focusing on.
You’ve worked closely with MSPs and service management. What is life really like for an MSP today? What are the biggest pressures MSPs are dealing with, and how has the role changed as customers expect more automation, AI and value from their service providers?
MSPs are facing squeezed margins, rising client expectations, and growing demand for AI expertise. But the bigger opportunity lies in integrating siloed services and connecting technology delivery to meaningful business outcomes.
Yeah, it’s still challenging. Well, I see it as a challenge, but it’s actually an opportunity.
There are many MSPs across the African continent and around the world. I’m lucky enough to work with quite a few of them in South Africa, and their margins are getting squeezed. Client expectations are sometimes not aligned with what service providers have put forward, so there’s a clash in expectations.
There’s certainly a demand for AI-based solutions and AI expertise. I know a few companies in South Africa have set up AI competencies or what they’re now calling AI factories to help people put their own models in place.
But generally, the biggest challenge I see is integration. That’s the big one. Everybody is siloed. Companies today are working with multiple MSPs, and they’re starting to realise that MSPs are becoming extremely competent at delivering technical services.
They’re now starting to move towards wanting an MSP that can aggregate all of this together and present it through the client’s experience in a meaningful business way. They want their MSP to enable the business to be successful rather than simply be competent at managing technologies.
When you come in as a consultant and a customer says, “We need to improve our IT service management,” where do you actually start? What do you look at first, and how do you work out whether the problem is people, process, technology or something else?
Every improvement initiative should begin with understanding the context and assessing the current state. The underlying issue could involve people, technology, processes, or even vendors.
Yeah, good question. In nearly all instances, I have this kind of approach of orientation initially. Context is probably the most important thing.
In any consulting engagement I do, everybody comes in saying, “I need help with X.” You know, let’s just talk about X. What is X? Where is the pain being felt? Articulate it, show me some data and information, and let me observe.
So it’s very important that when somebody says they want to improve service management, I ask, “What about it? What is it you’re specifically looking to achieve here?”
Once you’ve done that orientation, in nearly all instances, I do what I would term an assessment.
You just mentioned people, process, and technology. I use a number of ISO, ITIL, COBIT, and other background standards and methodologies to perform an as-is assessment that covers those four areas.
In nearly all instances, that’s the most important part of any improvement initiative, in my opinion. It’s about getting that as-is snapshot with the context of what you’re trying to achieve.
Nearly always, through that digging and observing, you discover the issue. It could span across people and technology, it could be a value stream or process issue, or it could even be a vendor issue.
So, assessments and orientation are the starting point.
What are some of the most common service management challenges you see organisations struggling with in South Africa? Are there any challenges that are particularly local, or do you find that most organisations are dealing with the same fundamental problems you see globally?
Organisations across South Africa and Africa have become good at the basics of IT support, but many still operate in technical silos. The next step is to bring services together and make them more customer experience-focused and aligned with business needs.
They’re actually different. In this part of the world, across the African continent, I’m going to talk about the continent because I stay in South Africa, but I do a lot of work with various companies across Africa.
In South Africa and Africa, we’ve kind of bedded down the support side of the business. Break-fix and that kind of stuff, we’re pretty good at. Same as the rest of the world, actually.
The one thing we’re struggling with is what I term as “silositis.” It’s like a little disease, like tonsillitis. Companies are still operating in silos. We’re still going to business in technical silos.
What I see as a big thing in Europe is that whole integration I was talking about, where we go to the business with one face, a business-aligned viewpoint, and a focus on customer experience.
That’s where we’re kind of a bit behind the curve. We’re starting out there now. That’s been in place for quite a while, in my experience and understanding of Europe.
So that’s the biggest challenge. We’ve become good at the basics, and now we need to elevate ourselves to become more customer experience-focused and start integrating what we do technically into something meaningful for the business.
But we’ll get there. We’re an innovative bunch in this part of the world, without a doubt.
Looking ahead, what do you think service management professionals need to get better at? With AI changing how support is delivered and organisations moving towards broader enterprise service management, what skills or ways of thinking will become increasingly important?
Service management professionals need to embrace AI while strengthening their organisational change management capabilities. Understanding people's concerns, behaviours, and resistance to change will become increasingly important.
I think we need to embrace AI, not just general AI through prompts and searches, but also setting up agents for ourselves that can help us become more productive, get things done, and analyse information.
It’s a tool we can use to make ourselves much more productive and probably a little more accurate. But we still need that human element. We shouldn’t just rely on the technology and what it produces. It requires thinking, analysis, and vetting. So, embrace AI and work with it.
The bigger opportunity I see is for organisations to become extremely competent in organisational change management. Having a functional unit dedicated to change management, where we become good at understanding our workforce and clients as human beings, is going to be important.
What are their likes and dislikes? Why are they resisting change? There are a whole range of techniques involved, and it’s almost an art in itself. Having people who can organise projects and programmes and embed organisational change management into them will be extremely important. They need to understand people’s traits, resistance to change, and what triggers and motivates them.
If you’re in the business of people, you’re in a good space.
I also think this is becoming more important because AI is going to play a bigger role in the world, especially when robotics comes into the picture. There’s one thing having artificial intelligence, and then there’s the robotics element. Potentially, the world could look very different from a human perspective in the next three to five years. That’s going to create anxiety, doubt, and potentially some suffering. Having people around who can help others navigate that is extremely important.
Across 2006, 2016, and 2026, three decades, how has support changed at its core?
Support has moved beyond simply reacting to problems. Organisations are becoming more proactive, customer-centric, and focused on preventing issues before they affect people.
What stayed the same? I think the way companies that have adopted service management practices operate is that we’ve become very good at basic support. A lot of these service management disciplines have helped us get that right. When things go wrong, we can react and act accordingly.
What has changed in my experience over the last 30 years is that the technology has changed completely, and so has what we’re having to look after.
The movement towards being more proactive seems to be happening more and more. I don’t think we shout enough about that. I’ve seen with my own eyes various companies, MSPs, and IT departments in corporates that spend a lot of time and effort doing Site Reliability Engineering, building high-availability solutions, and using artificial intelligence to help us be more proactive and stop things from going wrong before they impact somebody.
We’ve become better and better at that, and that does seem to be the focus.
If I look at it at a basic level, 20 or 30 years ago, it was all about support. We’ve gradually become more proactive, more focused on customer experience, and more customer-centric. That’s where we’re going now.
We’ve kind of moved from the back office to the front office over the years, which is great. Actually, it should have always been like that, in my opinion. But we tend to start where it hurts us the most.
Now, the pain is moving more towards the business side, and we’re becoming more proactive. That’s certainly the biggest change I’ve noticed.
What are the pros and cons of AI?
AI can accelerate tasks such as reporting, analysis, and recommendations, but its growing use makes governance and oversight essential. Organisations need safeguards to ensure AI systems operate ethically and deliver benefits without causing harm.
I think the pros are quite clear. I am a fan of AI. It helps us get many things done quicker, whether that’s preparing reports, conducting analysis, or making recommendations. As a piece of technology, it’s fantastic at helping us with various tasks, both at work and outside of work.
But the biggest worry for me is governance.
At Fox, I’ve taken an interest in the different large language models and how companies are helping clients build models using their own data and produce bespoke AI solutions. That’s fascinating. But what interests me even more is understanding what needs to be in place to govern these models and provide proper oversight.
We need to put the right guardrails in place to ensure that these models act ethically, don’t cause harm, and actually deliver benefits. We’ve seen some high-profile incidents that raise concerns about how AI systems might behave without proper oversight.
So, if I had to sum up the biggest concern, it’s this: we need to get better at AI governance.
What’s one ITSM trend today that’s genuinely underrated?
Ownership and accountability are often overlooked in service management. When every service and practice has a clear owner, it creates focus, drives improvement, and leads to better outcomes.
It’s actually funny you should ask me this. I was having a conversation with a group of people last week, and they asked me something almost identical.
They asked, “Ian, if you had to give us one piece of advice about service management, what would it be?”
And I said, ownership and accountability.
What I mean by that, and it’s still lacking today, is that if we are providing services and products to the business or clients, each one of them should have an owner. Someone should be accountable for that service that the client uses throughout the entire organisation.
It is our job to monitor, manage, improve, and work with our colleagues and stakeholders to make it better.
Practices, ways of working, and competencies should each have an owner within the organisation.
What I’ve seen is that ownership and accountability provide focus, and with focus comes improvement and good outcomes.
If we don’t assign ownership and accountability, responsibilities become segmented across the organisation. Nobody owns them. That creates confusion and misalignment, and nobody really pays attention because it’s not really on them. As a person, it’s not part of their role.
So, if you had to write a book on being good at service management, the number one thing would be ownership and accountability.
