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The Why Is Always a Who™: Why ITSM Fails and How AI Forces Us to Finally Fix the People Problem
SKU: 6370
Authors: Alef Girma
Authors: Alef Girma
Discover why people are the foundation of successful IT Service Management. Drawing on more than twenty years of experience and original research, Alef Girma explores the human factors behind persistent service delivery challenges and presents a practical model for addressing them. The Why Is Always a Who™ challenges established assumptions and examines why getting these foundations right matters more than ever in the age of AI.
Available for pre-order! Buy today and we’ll email you as soon as The Why Is Always a Who™: Why ITSM Fails and How AI Forces Us to Finally Fix the People Problem becomes available on November 17, 2026.
Price: $34.99
Product description
Processes don’t deliver services. Tools don’t create outcomes. Frameworks don’t build commitment. People do.
For more than three decades, IT Service Management (ITSM) has pursued improvements through better processes, stronger frameworks and increasingly sophisticated technology. Yet familiar service delivery challenges persist.
In The Why Is Always a Who™, Alef Girma examines why investment in the machinery of service management has outpaced investment in its human foundations. He makes the case that organizations have consistently underestimated the one thing that determines whether service management actually works: the people expected to deliver it.
Drawing on more than twenty years of experience and original research, Alef identifies a structural gap behind persistent ITSM failures. He presents a practical model for closing it, comprising three pillars and a diagnostic methodology built through practice.
As AI reshapes service management, these foundations become even more critical. Technology can amplify strengths, but it can also accelerate existing weaknesses. Introducing AI without addressing the underlying human challenges risks repeating familiar failures at greater scale.
This book will help you:
- Understand why seventy percent of ITSM initiatives fail — and why decades of framework updates and technology investments have not changed it.
- Identify the structural gap that has been present in ITSM since the profession’s formation.
- Assess your organization’s human foundation before your next ITSM or AI investment.
- Apply a three-pillar operational model and diagnostic methodology built from two decades of practice.
Written for ITSM professionals, consultants and leaders responsible for service delivery and organisational change, The Why Is Always a Who™ challenges readers to rethink what makes service management succeed.
Because the future of service management depends on understanding who makes it all work—and why.
About the author
Alef Girma is an IT Service Management professional, consultant and author with more than twenty years’ experience locally and internationally. He holds a Master’s in IT Service Management, and advanced ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 certifications.
He has served on the board of directors of the priSM (professional recognition of individuals in Service Management) Institute for the Americas under itSMF USA and earned the Distinguished Professional Service Management (DPSM®) credential.
Alef is the creator of the Integrated Service Management Approach, a proprietary operational model for embedding, sustaining, and continuously improving service management within organizations.
His work is grounded in a simple but consequential belief: that people are not a supplement to good service management – they are the foundation everything else is built on.