Implementation and impacts of IT Service Management in the IT function

In recent years, organizations have made significant IT investments, including digital transformation programs, with the aim of enhancing the quality and delivery of services, and creating greater value for stakeholders. However, deriving value from IT investments and digital transformation necessitates, among other factors, a solid mastery of the IT function. In light of this, IT Service Management (ITSM) has emerged as a crucial and widely implemented approach to managing an organization's IT function, with the goal of achieving both operational and strategic benefits. Yet, despite its wide adoption, this approach has been undertheorized by academics, and there is limited understanding of the impacts that ITSM can generate for organizations as well as the mechanisms through which these impacts are achieved. In order to address this problem, this paper performs a systematic literature review examining research published on ITSM between 2012 and 2021 in order to understand what has occurred rather than what could or should be expected. Based on the findings, the paper advances that ITSM should be considered a Management Control System that includes a variety of control practices to achieve greater performance, transparency, and customer-focus within the IT function. It is also argued that these outcomes in turn increase client satisfaction and business/IT alignment. A model of the organizational impacts of ITSM is developed and ITSM is suggested as a subject for further, richer research into IS controls. •Categorizes controls and impacts from 126 ITSM studies published between 2012 and 2021.•Advances ITSM as a Management Control System (MCS).•Provides a model of immediate and second-order impacts of the ITSM MCS.•Describes 5 control practice types with evidence of each from ITSM implementations.