An IT Service Management Literature Review: Challenges, Benefits, Opportunities, and Implementation Practices

The governance and systematic alignment of technology-enabled service delivery within organisations has become a central preoccupation of contemporary management and information systems scholarship. As organisations across both public and private sectors grow increasingly dependent on digital infrastructure for operational continuity, competitive differentiation, and stakeholder value creation, the processes and frameworks through which such services are planned, monitored, maintained, and continuously improved have attracted extensive scholarly examination. This review synthesises evidence from 75 peer-reviewed and scholarly contributions spanning more than two decades of research to examine prevailing theories, dominant frameworks, documented challenges, quantified benefits, emergent opportunities, and widely recognised implementation practices associated with the governance of technology service delivery. Adopting a systematic analytical approach, the review integrates findings from diverse national, sectoral, and institutional contexts, including evidence from European, North American, Asian, African, and Latin American settings. The review identifies persistent tensions between the aspirational goals of service alignment and the practical obstacles—encompassing cultural resistance, financial constraints, measurement challenges, and skills deficits—that constrain the pace and depth of adoption in many organisations. The documented benefits of structured service governance include measurable gains in service quality, enhanced stakeholder satisfaction, reduced operational costs, and greater transparency in technology-related accountability structures. Emergent opportunities are identified in the domains of cloud-enabled service orchestration, agile process integration, and the digital transformation of service functions in developing and transitional economies. Critical success factors, including executive commitment, comprehensive staff training, and process-oriented organisational culture, are synthesised from the available evidence base. The review concludes by mapping productive avenues for future empirical investigation, particularly in under-researched geographic and sectoral contexts that remain insufficiently represented in the existing literature.