Enterprise Service Management

What is Enterprise Service Management?

To improve efficiency, performance, and service delivery, Enterprise Service Management (ESM) extends IT service management to other business areas outside of IT, like HR, Facilities, Finance, etc.

ESM enhances accessibility to all business services, enabling faster service delivery while facilitating ITSM processes like request management, incident management, problem management, change management, and service asset and configuration management.

Enterprise service management applies ITSM principles, structures, and technology like service desks, self-service portals, knowledge management, chatbots, workflow automation, and incident and change management processes.

For example, ITSM practices like knowledge management can help everyone – from mid to senior management – receive assistance and access information in a self-service mode through a unified interface.

ESM enables organizations to automate and gather collective knowledge by utilizing ITSM principles to increase effectiveness, boost productivity, and deliver better services in all business areas.

ESM vs ITSM: The Difference

ITSM and ESM are fundamentally similar, but there is one distinction. ESM application, unlike ITSM, relies heavily on the assistance of several business functions collaborating and sharing supporting services between departments, including not just technology or tools but also techniques, procedures, and workflows.

Since ESM has its foundation in ITSM, the thought process should be making the shift from ITSM to ESM rather than ITSM vs ESM. While ITSM implementation enables organizations to consolidate all teams, standardize services, and streamline processes, ESM adopts ITSM principles to address the unique business requirements of each unit.

In the entire digital transformation process, IT can serve as a valuable counsel, including incorporating shared services principles and their management into business processes.

How ESM enables Digital Transformation

As organizations embark on digital transformation, inefficiencies across teams become increasingly apparent. ESM facilitates digital transformation in a variety of ways, including

Visibility into Services and Accessibility

There is limited insight into what each business department performs daily in any organization, and usually, they provide a variety of services typically accessed haphazardly. ESM assists organizations in clearly presenting and standardizing their services via a unified portal that is accessible round the clock.

Automation to Boost Efficiency

Processes can be easily discovered when all departments present their services through a digital catalog. An ITSM solution can help automate these services while tracking and logging everything for future references.

Break Down Internal Silos

Any process that requires two or more departments to collaborate and work closely through every stage usually becomes an exceedingly laborious and erroneous task. An organized approach using ESM specifies a consistent workflow, and because all the steps are automated, a standardized sequence is followed, guaranteeing that no team misses a beat.

Streamline Control and Governance

Services can be streamlined and centralized by clearly defining their touchpoints and deliverables across all business areas. If requests are submitted using a service management tool, tracking and measuring them to establish control and governance becomes an easy task.

What are the Benefits of ESM?

Enterprise Service Management enables the digital transformation of a sluggish, reactive organization with departments functioning in silos into an efficient business environment. ESM helps extend demonstrated advantages of ITSM into business activities, like:

Enhanced Efficiency:

Automation of tedious processes like ticket management using workflows can help reduce manual, repetitive efforts and help support teams of all business units to provide prompt resolutions.

Improved Productivity with Self-Service:

Every person in every business team is enabled to find resolutions to common queries by themselves, at any time, through a self-service portal. They can even submit and track the status of pending requests without any intervention from support teams.

Informed Decision-Making:

Articulated services offer increased operational visibility. With increased transparency into service delivery, the management can quickly gain deep insights into the value of the provided services and make data-driven decisions.

Enriched Customer Experience:

With ESM, all business teams can offer exceptional services through a single portal while maintaining autonomy with individual request templates and service catalogs powered by automation.

Boosted ROI on ITSM Solutions:

ROI on the implemented ITSM solution increases significantly when more departments and business functions use the ITSM solution for Enterprise Service Management.

Who can use ESM?

Virtually all business units can use ESM. But, good prospects for applying ESM techniques include any team that gets a high number of requests for the same issue,

delivers requests that must be tracked and managed promptly, manages approvals on the following steps, and regularly generates standard reports.

Few business use-cases to implement ESM in any organization:

• HR: To handle requests for HR processes like onboarding and off-boarding and provide answers about payroll, benefits, and ethics.
• Finance: To manage requests for invoices, reimbursements, payroll, purchasing, and answer finance-related questions.
• Travel: To request templates for flight booking, hotel booking, etc.
• Legal: To create and manage contracts, approve documents, and answer legal questions.
• Admin: To manage requests for office supplies, scheduling and tracking meeting rooms, and courier services.
• Facilities: To handle requests for office furniture, office relocations, and repairs and facilities maintenance.
• Support Team: To handle the support requests coming from the end customer.

Best Practices to Implement ESM

Getting started with ESM implementation can be difficult with each business team having its unique requirements. Here are some best practices to help smooth the process:

• Validate the necessity for ESM by understanding and presenting where cost can be saved, productivity can be increased, and efficiencies can be enhanced to improve overall business effectiveness.
• While ESM has a foundation in IT, IT teams should not be made responsible for implementing ESM solutions for other business operations. Each business department should take care of its ESM deployment.
• Understand that there is no universal strategy to service management that can apply to all business units. Some teams may demand greater flexibility, while others may require more automation.
• Use standard tools and technologies for all business teams to enable better interaction and collaboration. Consolidated user interfaces like a shared self-service portal can help provide a standardized and unified user experience.

Choosing the Right ESM Tool

The ESM strategy is now gradually being adopted by businesses and organizations worldwide. Various ITSM software companies are currently developing ESM-enabled solutions to align IT with other business operations better.

While selecting an ESM tool, the following capabilities should be taken under consideration:

• ITIL-aligned ITSM features
• Extended support for IT as well as non-IT use cases.
• No-code or low-code workflow automation.
• Automation capabilities like auto-ticket assignment.
• Self-service portal and chatbots.
• Change management optimization.
• Mobile application for the mobile workforce.

Motadata ServiceOps Advantage

In addition to the features mentioned above, Motadata ServiceOps ITSM platform offers some of the following capabilities to support any organization’s ESM implementation:

1. Unified Service Catalog for an E-commerce like ExperienceDifferent services can be categorized through the service catalog by including relevant details using custom service templates. Provided services can be requested from a unified, easy-to-use support portal.
2. Process AutomationConfigure custom workflows, approval workflows, and SLAs for each type of service to enable process automation. Codeless configurations and workflow designer that requires minimal manual effort to set up, run and update.
3. Technician Groups to Establish Access ControlLimit visibility into service tickets with role-based access based on support technician grouping and automated ticket routing to respective department’s technician groups to maintain the privacy of sensitive data.
4. Pre-built Service Request TemplatesPre-built service request templates for HR, IT, Travel, and Finance that respective departments can start using with minimum customization efforts.
5. Conversation AI for Response AutomationDeploy a virtual agent powered by NLP to parse incoming requests and suggest a possible solution from the knowledge base.