When Structure Isn’t Enough: Making IT Work for People

Over 90% of organisations globally use an IT service management framework. Most have ITIL in place. Many have COBIT. Governance controls are tighter than they have ever been.

Yet many CIOs recognise a quieter reality: structure alone does not guarantee adoption.

The numbers make this uncomfortable to ignore. According to McKinsey, 70% of organisational change initiatives fail, and the primary cause is employee resistance and lack of meaningful engagement.

Gartner's research deepens the picture: willingness to support enterprise change collapsed from 74% of employees in 2016 to just 43% in 2022. That decline was brutal. It happened because the human experience of change was never seriously addressed.

Even more concerning, studies of large IT programmes reveal that half exceed their budgets by massive margins, deliver 56% less value than expected, and 17% deteriorate so severely they threaten the survival of the organisation itself.

The Limitations of ITIL

Clearly, ITIL was never designed as a complete operational solution. It is a framework that organisations must interpret and adapt to their own human and organisational context. If you are a retail business, the complete ITIL implementation that works for you differs from one in the financial sector. Implementation tends toward replication, processes adopted wholesale, compliance tracked, and adoption assumed.

The alternative is that when ITIL is applied wholsale without the human factor, the result is governance that functions on paper and fractures in practice. The AXELOS ITSM Benchmarking Report found that despite widespread adoption, only a fraction of organisations describe their ITSM capabilities as genuinely working well.

Service desk and incident management were the only two practices to score above 30% for "working well" — meaning the vast majority of governance capability is implemented but underperforming.

source: ITSM.tools

This is a design problem. And it points to a structural limitation that no process framework was ever built to solve: IT governance, as a discipline, was designed around systems. Not around people.

What Mature IT Leadership Requires?

The organisations consistently closing this gap share a common characteristic. They treat human behaviour as a governance input. Services are designed around how people actually work, not how they are supposed to work.

Change is communicated in ways that connect to what people care about, integrating clear expectations into roles and responsibilities.

This shift is gaining formal recognition globally. The HIT Double Diamond Framework™, developed by HIT Global, represents one of the more structured attempts to formalise this discipline, integrating human-centred design directly into how IT governance is led, implemented, and experienced.

Rather than replacing established frameworks, it addresses the layer they were never built to handle.

Across global markets, and increasingly across Africa’s rapidly maturing IT ecosystems, this shift toward human-centered IT leadership is becoming a defining capability of modern IT organizations.

It signals a move beyond compliance-driven IT toward experience-led governance, where structure remains foundational, but human adoption becomes the true measure of success.

The organisations that will lead the next decade are those that understand human alignment as a governance capability in its own right.

One that demands as deliberate an investment as the ITIL framework it complements, if organizations are to realise true governance maturity.