Ask yourself this: “Did we design this outcome, or did it just happen?”
After taking HIT Global’strainings on HumanizingIT and HumanizingAI, I’ve come to a clear conclusion: IT support has never lacked effort. What it sometimes lacks is intentional service design.
Service teams are incredibly busy, but busy is not always effective. Our team’s goal is simple: “Solve one thing permanently every day.” We close hundreds of tickets daily, but how many of those represent permanent, intentional fixes? How many of those are aimed at preventing the nextincident rather than reacting to the last one?
Tickets close. Dashboards turn green. Yet employees feel friction andanalysts feel stretched thin. While we expect to support customers every day, very few customers expect to need IT at all. Intentional service leadership closes the gap by deliberately designing outcomes for customers, employees, and the business using proven standards.
Well-designed service doesn’t just reduce noise. It manages costs, aligns priorities, lowers risk and clarifies responsibility. Empathy doesn’t replace process. It guides how we use it.
When service management is designed intentionally, process reduces cognitive load instead of shifting it onto people. Empathy becomes scalable when it is engineered into how work flows, how decisions are made and how success is measured.
Where Structure Makes IT Human
The Humanizing IT movement reminds us that every ticket represents a human moment; a deadline, a disruption or a moment of stress.
Empathy doesn’t replace process. It guides how we use it. When service management is designed intentionally, processes reduce cognitive load instead of shifting it onto people.
Empathy becomes scalable when it is purposefully engineered into how work flows.
Employee Care Is an Operational Decision
Burnout is rarely an individual failure. It is often a system design issue.
Frameworks from HDI and ICMI consistently emphasize workforce enablement, coaching and sustainability. Intentional leaders treat employee care as a service management responsibility, not a side initiative.
That intent shows up in practical ways:
• Staffing to demand instead of hope
• Clear escalation paths instead of hero culture
• Coaching focused on judgment, not just speed
• Metrics used for improvement, not pressure
When employees feel supported, customers feel it immediately.
Knowledge-Centered Service: Making Care Repeatable
Few practices reflect intentional service leadership more clearly than Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS).
KCS treats knowledge as a living asset created in the flow of work. This reduces repeat issues, accelerates onboarding, empowers self-service and eliminatesreliance on a few “go-to” individuals.Most important, it respects employee time and cognitive energy. Asking people to solve the same problem repeatedly is neither efficient nor humane.
A Real World Example. And, How to do it Better
At 4:42 p.m. on a Friday, a ticket comes in:
“Laptop disconnecting from VPN. Urgent.”
The analyst follows process perfectly. Logs are checked. Intermittent drops are identified. The VPN profile is reset. Notes are documented. The ticket is closed with a standard message: “VPN profile reset. Please reopen if issue persists.”
At 7:15 p.m., the same user calls back. Frustrated.
What the ticket never captured was context. The user was finalizing payroll before a hard cutoff. Every disconnect forced a full re-login. The word urgentwasn’t impatience. It was fear.
The fix addressed the symptom, not the moment.
What an Empathetic, Intentional Approach Would Have Looked Like
Same process. One different step.Early in the call, the analyst asks:
“Before we change anything, can you tell me what this is blocking right now?”
That answer changes everything.
The analyst stays on the line instead of closing immediately, tests a wired connection as a safeguard, flags the ticket as payroll-impacting, creates a problem record for recurring VPN drops, and adds a short knowledge article titled “VPN Drops During Long Sessions.”
The ticket stays open 20 more minutes.
But the problem doesn’treturn next week.
The user completes payroll.
The analyst avoids repeat calls.
The system learns something.
Why This Matters
Nothing in this story required abandoning process.Empathy didn’t slow the work.It redirected it.
The difference wasn’t kindness.It was curiosity.
The ticket became a human moment under pressure.The most empathetic thing the team could have donewas design the system so that moment didn’t repeat.
The Leadership Question That Changes Everything
The most powerful question intentional leaders ask is simple:“Did we design this outcome, or did it just happen?”
Service organizations shift from reactive to resilient, from busy to effective, and from transactional to trusted.
Intentionality is not accidental.It is leadership by design.