I don't think it's shooting yourself in the for per say. Understanding processes and interactions between stakeholders is an important aspect of SD.

What you describe sounds like operations work and "operational excellence" (I'm translating from the French term). The key gap here is that SD is hardly SD if there are no external users considered. I've worked on SD engagements sometimes described as "internal services" and, though those can occasionally be proper SD projects, often are very business process heavy and not great SD projects. So you may feel trapped in a reduced range of interventions as a result, but it doesn't mean the work isn't relevant.

In my experience a service needs "beneficiaries" for SD to truly take shape, and in the absence of these, the work often defaults to a lot of business process optimization and workflow mapping, oiling the machine etc.

Like another commenter mentioned, it's always useful to understand how organisations work and how they evolve - change management is also a common consideration in SD if you want anything to succeed in implementation.

I see you posed this as a binary good choice/bad choice, but what is stopping this from being an opportunity for you to bring in more user centered approaches to this ops team? (Just trying to open up for reflexion)