Most boards don’t discuss incidents, changes, requests, SLAs, MTTR, or knowledge articles. Yet many service management leaders continue to present those metrics as though they are inherently meaningful to executives.
Twenty years ago, many security leaders approached executive communication in much the same way. Conversations centered on vulnerabilities, patch compliance, security controls, and other technical topics. Today, successful CISOs are far more likely to discuss business disruption, operational resilience, regulatory exposure, and organizational risk. In fact, Deloitte specifically advises CISOs that “technical metrics don’t resonate in the boardroom” and recommends focusing discussions on business impact and organizational value instead.
Service management is facing a similar challenge.
Service Management’s Language Problem
Contrary to what some might believe, service management doesn’t have a language problem because practitioners are poor communicators. Service management has a language problem because many organizations have confined it to an operational role.
For years, service management has been associated with incidents, requests, changes, service desk operations, and SLA reporting. The result is predictable: service management leaders naturally talk about the things they’ve been asked to manage.
The irony is that service management frameworks have never described service management that narrowly. At its core, service management exists to help customers achieve desired outcomes while creating value through the effective use of services. Services are intended to support business objectives.
Yet many organizations have reduced service management to the efficient execution of IT processes.
When service management doesn’t discuss value
Somewhere along the way, many organizations stopped managing services and started managing tickets. We claim to practice service management, but much of what we actually manage is operational workflow.
The result is a credibility gap. We tell executives that service management is about value, outcomes, and business objectives. Then we present dashboards filled with ticket counts, SLA attainment, backlog volumes, and MTTR. We should not be surprised when executives struggle to connect service management to business value.
This challenge is not new. Chris Barrett has written extensively about bridging ITSM concepts to boardroom value. One of his observations is that IT often arrives at executive and board discussions in a reactive or defensive posture, reporting incidents, outages, project status, and risks rather than discussing value creation. As he put it, for many organizations IT arrives at the board table like an unwelcome house guest.
If service management leaders want executive attention, we should stop asking executives to care about incidents, requests, and SLAs. Instead, we should demonstrate how service management reduces friction, improves productivity, enables organizational agility, strengthens resilience, and helps achieve strategic objectives.
The problem becomes particularly visible when we look at one of service management’s most common measures: the SLA.
The SLA Test
Consider the ubiquitous SLA.
Organizations proudly report SLA attainment percentages as evidence of service quality and value delivery. Yet many of these so-called SLAs are nothing more than configuration settings within an ITSM platform: response targets, resolution timers, escalation thresholds, and workflow triggers.
They measure whether the tool performed as configured. They do not necessarily measure whether the business achieved a meaningful outcome.
A true service level agreement should reflect a business need. It should describe how a service supports patient care, enables transaction processing, facilitates customer onboarding, or supports critical manufacturing operations.
Instead, many organizations report:
- 95% of Priority 2 incidents resolved within eight hours
- 98% first-response compliance
- 99% SLA attainment
An executive’s reasonable response might be, “That’s interesting, but what does that mean for the business?”
And too often, IT struggles to answer.
As I’ve argued previously, many organizations don’t actually have service level agreements. They have ticket processing targets masquerading as service level agreements. In many cases, what is called an SLA is really just an ITSM platform configuration setting.
An SLA that cannot be connected to a business outcome is just a timer.
What CISOs Learned
As cybersecurity matured as a business discipline, successful CISOs recognized a fundamental truth: executives and boards were never going to become interested in cybersecurity simply because security professionals thought it was important. To gain executive attention, security leaders had to demonstrate how cybersecurity affected the organization’s ability to achieve its objectives.
That shift changed the conversation. Discussions that once centered on vulnerabilities, patches, and security controls increasingly focused on business risk, resilience, regulatory exposure, and operational continuity. The lesson from successful CISOs is not that they learned a new vocabulary. The lesson is that they stopped describing technical activities and started describing business consequences.
Lessons for Service Management
Too often, service management conversations begin with incidents, requests, changes, SLAs, ticket volumes, and other operational measures. While those metrics may be important to managing services, they are rarely important to executives in and of themselves. Executives are far more interested in understanding how technology services contribute to employee productivity, customer experience, organizational agility, operational resilience, and strategic success.
Consider how differently the same information can be presented. A report showing that MTTR improved by 15% may be meaningful to IT operations. A discussion explaining that employees regained access to critical business tools more quickly, reducing productivity losses and business disruption, is meaningful to business leaders. The metric hasn’t changed. The context has.
The same principle applies to services themselves. Many IT organizations still define services by the technologies they manage. Business leaders, however, do not invest in technology for technology’s sake. They invest because technology provides the capabilities to enable communication, collaboration, revenue generation, customer engagement, and other business outcomes.
Perhaps the most significant shift is how we think about tickets. Service management professionals often view incidents, requests, and complaints as work that must be processed efficiently. Executives tend to see something different. Every ticket represents friction. It is evidence that something is delaying a transaction, interrupting productivity, creating risk, or preventing someone from achieving a desired outcome.
Seen through that lens, tickets become less about workload and more about understanding barriers to organizational performance.
Ultimately, the most effective service management conversations begin not with an activity but with a business objective. The question should never be, “How many incidents did we resolve?” The more important question is, “What business outcome did our efforts help achieve?”
The conversation must change
For years, service management has measured what matters to IT. The challenge now is to communicate what matters to the business.
The lesson from CISOs isn’t that they abandoned technology conversations. It’s that they stopped leading with them. Successful security leaders learned to connect technical activities to business risk, resilience, and organizational objectives. Service management leaders must make the same shift.
If we want executive attention and support, we must stop asking executives to care about incidents, requests, SLAs, MTTR, and ticket volumes. Instead, we need to show how service management increases productivity, enhances resilience, reduces risk, drives growth, enhances employee and customer experience, and contributes to reaching strategic goals.
The organizations that elevate service management from an operational discipline to a strategic capability will be those whose leaders deliberately connect services to business outcomes and organizational value.
The journey to the executive suite or boardroom does not begin with better dashboards. It begins with a better conversation.
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