The Magic Quadrant is dead. But ITSM isn’t.

Not long ago, I received an interesting email from Gartner letting each of the vendors listed in the 2022 Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms know that the current version of this research would be its last. As of 2023, the Magic Quadrant would be retired and replaced by a new publication called Market Guide.

This is big news. IYKYK.

What this means

This change affects both the Magic Quadrant (MQ) and Critical Capabilities (CC) guides. The MQ is intended to provide an analysis of companies and their standing within a market. The CC is intended to evaluate specific product capabilities (of the listed MQ vendors) at a point in time. When used together, they can serve as important inputs for Gartner customers to use when making key software buying decisions.

A Gartner Market Guide is different. It is a high-level market analysis with no ranking, positioning, or scoring. Sometimes it’s because a market is in the early stages of its lifecycle and there’s not enough “mass” to define it fully. In other cases, it’s because a market has fully matured. IT service management (ITSM) is an example of the latter.

Why is this happening?

As a longtime Gartner Expert, I was involved with many previous versions of this research as lead and co-author. As early as 2017, I was a vocal advocate for closing the ITSM research thread and taking on “what’s next.” As someone hired to cover ITSM, you might ask why I would take such a position.

My assertion has been that the traditional approach to ITSM fails its constituency. The “why” behind my answer is two parts:  

1. ‘Inside-out’ thinking

Traditional ITSM propagates an inwardly focused, provider-centric view of managing IT and stakeholder engagement. Refining and optimizing processes is almost universally about time, money, or resources that the IT service provider organization must allocate to do its work, without regard to whether the stakeholder gets what they need or derives sufficient value from their work.

Let’s take change management as an example. In many cases, IT organizations have a tough time managing change. Bungled handoffs between development and operations, an insufficient understanding of the scope or magnitude of the change, and a host of other issues end up resulting in service failures, as well as availability, capacity, and performance problems resulting in adverse (often significant) business impact.

In order to do a “better job of managing change,” such organizations will attempt to make their processes closely resemble the idealized form of change management depicted in publications. After all, that’s what they were taught in their certification class, right? Wrong!

In the vast majority of cases that I worked with customers on, these changes added delays, increased costs, introduced friction, and offered little or no measurable improvement in actual change success rates or reduction in negative business impact. 

 This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to do a better job, but the basis on which we determine what “better” is must change!

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2. The maturity fallacy

Way too many customers came to me saying, “We’re a very immature organization and we need to fix that.”

The implication here is that by becoming “more mature,” they’d do a better job of meeting the needs of those they serve. While this is a wonderful thought and intention, the results from pursuing gains in maturity don't add up!

The data that I used while working at Gartner showed that, despite years of effort and carefully curated research published to help customers address their performance gaps, they consistently reported maturity levels in the low 2s (on a scale of 1 to 5). Only a small percentage ever scored higher than that.

It was very rare for the IT organization to measure itself on how well it served customers and how customers perceived the organization.

At the end of the day, ITSM maturity is a lagging indicator and an insufficient basis to manage the evolution of an IT organization.

Should we just stop doing ITSM?

My answer to this question is an emphatic “No!”

It’s not that the core components of IT service management are bad or without benefit, they’re just not being used properly. 

The key shift for IT organizations is from being inwardly focused (inside-out) to being focused on the needs of those they serve (outside-in). The measures used to determine what to change and whether those changes result in tangible benefits to the users of their product or services can be shown in:

• Increasing value realized

• Decreasing process or service friction

• Increasing user satisfaction levels

Using these measures as success metrics is the first step toward meaningful change. Once the measures are chosen and clear goals are established, IT organizations can select the right ITSM elements to support the required changes to meet those goals.

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