Every service management framework sets out what people are supposed to do. Far fewer explain why they do it, or why they so often don’t, and a lot of good practice dies on contact with a real organization for exactly that reason. Maarten Bordewijk has spent 30 years working on why people follow the practice or ignore it. His argument, after a career of training and running service management simulations, is that the work is behavior before it is process, and that teams keep writing procedures for a problem that was never procedural.
He makes the case as the tenth guest in Conversations with Giants, Roman Jouravlev’s interview series, and as one of the people who taught Roman ITIL early in his career.
Everything Is Behavior
Any activity in an organization is behavior, and culture is the behavior a group of people shares. So when a practice is not being followed, the reason is behavioral, and it will not be fixed by rewriting the practice. Maarten points to Organizational Behavior Management, the evidence-based school associated with Aubrey Daniels, and service management has mostly ignored it. He wants ITIL and the models around it to be founded on science, meaning claims you can test across many people, not claims that only sound right. He has no problem with theory. What he rejects is theory nobody has checked against how people behave.
The same idea is behind a position he credits partly to fellow guest Mark Smalley: the owner of a business system should not be an IT person. The questions a system owner has to answer are business questions about what the work is for, so putting an IT person in the seat moves the decision back to the department that was never meant to make it. If the work is behavioral, then the current enthusiasm for automating it quickly runs into a limit.
AI Does Not Remove the Need to Think
Maarten uses AI and teaches AI governance, and he calls himself a concerned parent about it, which is his shorthand for caring most about the governance side. His argument is that today’s AI is not intelligent enough to do the thing service management exists for: working out what people are trying to do for others and helping them do it. The line he gives students who lean on a chatbot to summarize their reading is blunt: the machine has no brain, so use your own. He has nothing against the summary, only against skipping the part where you understand the material well enough to argue with it.
That caution has just become more relevant because ITIL (Version 5) arrived in February 2026, built to be AI-native, with a dedicated AI governance module. Automate more, he says, and keep your own judgment switched on, because the framework can’t tell you what good looks like and it can’t think for you.
You Learn a Service Management Practice by Applying It
Passing an exam is not the same as understanding what the exam is about. Maarten’s evidence is 30 years of running business simulation games, the kind built by GamingWorks, where a team has to do the work in an invented scenario and find out fast where it breaks. Apollo 13, Mars Lander, the Phoenix Project, a build-a-pyramid exercise run for a demanding pharaoh: each one forces people to communicate and cooperate rather than retreat into their own corner. You try something, it fails, and you learn why in a way no presentation slide delivers.
He is honest that the games never spread as far as they deserved, and he puts part of that down to the loss of the energetic people who championed them. A good simulation needs a strong facilitator and someone willing to push it, and there are fewer of both than there used to be. Applying an idea until you understand it is the step most training skips.
His Honest Verdict on ITIL Today
Maarten was wary when ITIL 4 moved away from the process-heavy world of earlier versions toward the service value chain and a wider view of the work. He is past that now, rates the newest ITIL as a sound next step, and thinks most of the resistance to the change, his own included, is generational. People who learned the discipline when an IT service desk “did incident management” and not much else struggle with the idea that the same team also handles requests, events, and changes.
Asked what he would do with unlimited resources and a free hand to shape the framework, his first answer is that he would not start over, which lines up with one of ITIL’s own guiding principles. The value of ITIL is that it has become the thing everyone already uses, so scrapping it to rewrite it would throw away the only reason it works. What he would strengthen is the human side and the science underneath it, and he would keep governance and critical thinking at the front as the AI content grows.
Service Management Frameworks Move Forward Through People
A framework only gets better when someone understands it well enough to change it. Roman is a working example: he took Maarten’s ITIL classes early on and went on to help develop ITIL 4 and the version after it. As the new AI-native ITIL automates more of the routine, the skill Maarten has spent 30 years teaching, understanding the work well enough to question it, becomes the harder and more valuable half of the job.
Service Management Key Takeaways
- Treat a practice that isn’t being followed as a behavior problem, not a documentation one. Find the behavioral reason before you rewrite the process.
- Give the system owner role to a business person, not an IT person. The decisions it carries are business decisions about what the work is for.
- Use AI for the mechanical work, but don’t hand it the understanding. If you can’t argue with what it produces, you don’t know the problem well enough yet.
- Test whether people can apply a practice, through simulations or real scenarios, rather than assuming an exam pass means they have understood it.
- With ITIL (Version 5), don’t start from scratch. Build on what your teams already use and place greater emphasis on the human and behavioral sides.
The full conversation with Maarten Bordewijk is available as episode 10 of Conversations with Giants, hosted by Roman Jouravlev:
Further Reading
- https://itsm.tools/what-is-itsm/
- https://itsm.tools/when-three-different-vendors-each-say-the-outage-isnt-their-fault/
- https://itsm.tools/microsoft-spla/
- https://itsm.tools/agentic-ai-in-itsm-it-service-desk/
- https://itsm.tools/itsm-best-practices-it-help-desk/
Sophie Danby
Sophie is a freelance ITSM marketing consultant, helping ITSM solution vendors to develop and implement effective marketing strategies.
She covers both traditional areas of marketing (such as advertising, trade shows, and events) and digital marketing (such as video, social media, and email marketing). She is also a trained editor.
