What if I told you that implementing Enterprise Service Management is your opportunity to improve service delivery radically across your entire organization? I hope I’ve piqued your curiosity. I’ll explain how in this blog.
What is Enterprise Service Management?
Let’s start by defining Enterprise Service Management;
Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is the practice of applying or extending the workflows and principles of IT Service Management (ITSM) to the entire organization to boost efficiency, performance, and, above all, service delivery.
What is the difference between ITSM and ESM?
While IT Service Management primarily focuses solely on managing and delivering IT services, ESM goes beyond IT and applies those fantastic ITSM principles to the entire business.
After all, why should practices that improve service be limited to IT teams? To be honest, that doesn’t make sense. Does it?
ESM offers the opportunity to enhance service delivery across all business areas of your organization.
That way, finance, HR, legal, procurement, facilities, marketing, sales, development, etc., can take advantage and streamline workflows with increased efficiency and happier employees and customers as a result.
Now, you might wonder how ESM works and how to leverage the principles. If so, please keep reading. I’ll get more concrete with an example of improving an HR process, such as onboarding new employees, later in the blog.
How does the current service landscape look?
Most organizations have their own unique service ecosystem. However, it’s a fragmented landscape. Different teams use different tools, ranging from notes and spreadsheets to highly specialized software. Some teams have established processes, while others are still finding their way in fulfilling requests, changes, and handling errors.
So, what’s my point?
The service delivery for the entire organization will be better when the service infrastructure is cohesive.
Different ways of working and various processes and tools are less conducive if you strive for best-in-class service delivery.
Instead, we advocate for a structured process and way to manage and automate service workflows.
What are the benefits of Enterprise Service Management?
The value and benefits you’ll experience from ESM will depend on how widely you implement its capabilities.
However, based on experience from our ESM projects, you can expect to experience almost all of the following.
- Clearly defined services delivered consistently and in a structured manner across the entire business.
- Streamlined service delivery.
- Leveraging automation to drive efficiency.
- Breaking down internal silos by making departments work together.
- Increased productivity.
- Improved visibility into workflows, operations, and performance.
- Reduced costs, which management often appreciates.
- Standardization of service and support.
- Happier employees since requests will be handled promptly.
Example: Improve service delivery in the onboarding process
Onboarding new employees is a service that often requires the involvement of multiple departments. Although HR typically takes the lead, it’s undoubtedly a team effort.
One thing is certain. The onboarding process can significantly benefit from the capabilities of Enterprise Service Management.
During onboarding, HR is responsible for contact, interviews, department involvement, announcements, etc. Legal is responsible for the contract. IT is responsible for setting up hardware and software and Facilities for setting up the workplace and access authorization. These are just examples.
If there’s no structured workflow in place, the process is destined for chaos. It will probably work out anyway. However, it’s probably the opposite of structured, documented, productive, streamlined, and cost-effective.
Is it recognizable that employees in the different teams will ask each other; Have you set up the computer yet? Have you assigned permissions? Is the contract signed? You get the point. This inefficiency is a waste of valuable time.
We highly recommend implementing a structured workflow for onboarding — a collection of activities that must be executed in a specific sequence. This approach reduces confusion and creates a straightforward workflow that promotes transparency.
An example of a straightforward workflow
- The contract has been signed.
- IT creates an account and prepares hardware and software for the start day.
- IT assigns the correct permissions.
- Facility prepares the workstation.
- Requesting department organizes the employee’s start.
The process is transparent, and you should be able to track each step in the process and even verify if the defined process has been followed through an audit report.
I know. This workflow is simple and perhaps too straightforward, but I believe you get my point. The onboarding process will be easier and more efficient if a proper workflow is set up. It will ultimately improve service delivery.
It’s also possible to configure rules and conditions while alerting and notifying the individual employees responsible for specific tasks.
Setting up workflows like this is easy and fast in Enterprise Service Management software. Onboarding is just one out of the hundreds or thousands of workflows within an organization that can benefit from ESM capabilities, which makes the software indispensable.
We’ve written a comprehensive white paper about the onboarding process that takes you from A-Z on the topic. Read it here.
Our approach to Enterprise Service Management
For VisionWillow, Enterprise Service Management is a grow-as-you-go process. We recommend starting with a few processes – maybe just one. It could be your service requests and incident management, the most used feature within most ESM software.
Attempting to implement all the capabilities across numerous projects or modules involving the entire organization will likely lead to failure. It’s essential to take a gradual approach, building upon each success.
This philosophy aligns, by the way, perfectly with the story behind our name, as we believe that all change begins with just one initiative or project. Once it’s taken root, the ones that follow are much more likely to become a success as well.
We are committed to supporting you throughout the entire implementation process of Enterprise Service Management. Our goal is to ensure that the necessary conditions are in place for you to improve service delivery across your entire organization.
Stay tuned for more blogs from my side. Next up is an article about how Enterprise Service Management helps accelerate your digital transformation.