Somewhere along the way, our industry got lazy. We stopped designing and started copying. “Best practices” turned into the bare minimum. Instead of asking what would actually help people, we grabbed whatever process someone else had whipped up, swapped out the company name, and called it done.
Service and experience design – once the fun, creative part of IT – got boiled down to templates, checkbox compliance, and workflows nobody questions. All in the name of efficiency and ease of service delivery.
The result is, sadly, a sea of cookie-cutter processes that technically function and have so much potential to impact earnings. We’ve mistaken “following the instructions” for building value. We lost the spark that made this work exciting in the first place: the curiosity, the problem-solving, and the human-centered thinking.
But the good news is, that creative muscle isn’t gone, it’s just a little out of practice. It’s time to start using it again.
Constraints are creative fuel
Budget, time, staffing, political buy-in – yeah, these are real constraints. And I’m not here to pretend they aren’t hard. But too often, we treat them like immovable roadblocks instead of what they really are: the shape of the playing field.
Constraints aren’t the enemy of good service design, they’re what make it worth doing. If you had unlimited money and unlimited time, you wouldn’t need to design anything – you’d just brute-force your way to a solution. But nobody lives in that fantasy world.
The truth is, constraints are what force us to get creative. They make us think harder about trade-offs, about what actually matters, about what will make the biggest difference with the least waste. That’s focus and strategy.
If your team has even a little bit of time, a little bit of budget, a little bit of attention from leadership, don’t waste it trying to copy what someone else did with completely different constraints. Protect it, prioritize it, treat it like a precious resource – because that’s what it is.
Too often, we act like our hands are tied before we even try to move them. But great experiences start with “How might we?” And once you start thinking that way, you’ll be surprised how far you can actually go.
Comfort is the enemy
One of the most dangerous phrases in IT: “This is how we’ve always done it.” A close second: “This is what other companies like us do.” Both sound harmless, even safe. But that kind of thinking is ultimately counter-productive and self-defeating.
We love comfort in IT. We love repeatable processes, predictable outcomes, and templates we don’t have to think too hard about. But comfort can be a trap. It convinces us that familiar equals effective, even when the world around us has changed completely. The tech is different, the users are different, the expectations are way, way different. But the process, the process stays exactly the same because “That’s how we did it at my last job” or “This is what the tool defaults to.”
The real problem is these so-called “best practices” we’re clinging to were born in an era where people were still using dial-up and calling the help desk because their mouse “stopped working” (it was unplugged). Those practices weren’t designed for modern hybrid work, or SaaS sprawl, or employees who expect consumer-level experiences at their job.
So if we’re still building services on those old assumptions, it’s no wonder we’re falling short. Comfort might feel safe – but it’s a dead end.
A laptop is never just a laptop
Let’s talk about laptops, because they’re a perfect example of how backwards our thinking can get.
You’ll hear someone say, “Why should we spend $200 more per device?” and on paper, sure, it looks like a waste. But dig a little deeper and you realize the purchase price is only about 20% of what that machine will actually cost over its life. The other 80% is support tickets, hardware failures, time lost while someone waits for a replacement or struggles through laggy performance, and just plain old frustration that makes people less productive.
But we don’t calculate that because we’re trained to look at line items, not outcomes. It’s easier to show savings on a spreadsheet than it is to prove that a better user experience leads to fewer IT escalations and happier employees. And so we keep buying cheap hardware, and then act surprised when it breaks or underperforms.
This is a result of the mindset behind how we design services. If you zoom out and look at the entire experience – procurement, setup, support, maintenance, replacement – suddenly spending a little more upfront doesn’t look so reckless. It looks smart, it looks human, it looks like design. And that means value.
Service design is the disruptor no one talks about
Everyone in IT talks about innovation, about disruption. About “transforming the digital experience.” There are days worth of keynote decks built around that kind of language. But when it comes time to actually do something different, everyone seems to be much more cautious, to a fault.
The truth is the real disruptor has been hiding in plain sight this whole time: service design. Experience design. The unsexy but powerful practice of actually thinking through how services work for the people using them. These are how we move the needle. Better outcomes, better tools, better relationships between IT and the rest of the business – it all starts here.
We’ve ignored these disciplines because they don’t come with easy fixes, shiny dashboards or instant ROI slides. But the teams that invest in experience management build better services. They earn trust. And they get to be the ones who finally, actually, do something different.
Final thought
It’s time to reawaken the creative side of IT. Not through flashy tools or buzzwords, but through thoughtful, user-centered design that embraces constraints, challenges comfort, and dares to imagine better.
Let’s stop asking “What’s cheapest?” or “What’s the most efficient?” and start asking “How do we truly improve the employee experience?” Because in the end, the best-designed service is the one people actually want to use.