5 Things to Look For in an Enterprise Service Management Tool

If you’ve seen the potential benefits of Enterprise Service Management (ESM) but are unsure whether your organization’s current ITSM tool is suitable for enterprise-wide use, you're not alone. Many teams often wonder if the use of IT Service Management (ITSM) capabilities currently in place can be leveraged in other business functions to improve operations and outcomes. To help, this article outlines five things to look for in an ITSM tool that will make it a fit-for-purpose ESM tool for your organization.

Before that list of five “things” though, it’s worth stating a key point when using your organization’s ITSM tool across the enterprise.

A key starting point when looking for an Enterprise Service Management tool

There’s no doubt that successful Enterprise Service Management, like ITSM, is dependent on fit-for-purpose technology enablement. It’s important, however, to not see ESM as simply the use of a corporate ITSM tool by other business functions. Instead, successful ESM requires a change in mindset to service-based thinking, and the intelligent adoption of ITSM best practices. Additionally, it also mandates the use of the ITSM tool in a way that doesn’t force-fit the other business functions to IT’s language and ways of working.

Importantly, there’s also a need for organizational change management to facilitate the execution of your ESM strategy delivery project. This is because this is the introduction of new ways of working and is thus a people change initiative not a technology.

5 things to look for in an Enterprise Service Management tool

The right Enterprise Service Management tool will help your whole organization, especially with the rise of remote work limiting the ability for people to work with manually-reliant processes and practices. In many ways, the replacement of these with new digital workflows in particular, is going to be an important need of your ESM tool. But this is just one of many things you’ll need. In fact, we recommend your chosen ESM ticks the proverbial boxes against the following list of five key needs:

1. Non-functional capabilities – These are the capabilities that, while not directly delivering the required digital workflows, allow an ITSM tool to fully meet the needs of ESM. To start, there’s the need for ease of use – for both service requesters and service providers. In many ways, these need to be consumer-like, with “consumer-grade” the new “enterprise-grade” when it comes to corporate technology. Then there are needs related to scalability, domain separation, and appropriate access controls – with human resources (HR) in particular needing to ensure that employee-related information is only accessible by those authorized to do so. Finally, there’s a need for domain-specific knowledge management to ensure that searches for help or automated recommendations – again for both service requesters and service providers – are focused on the business function context.
2. Core service management and digital workflow capabilities – These are the digitally-enabled capabilities that help work both flow and be achieved. This includes request handling, whether these are requests for help, information, service, or change. For example, for business functions such as HR, terminology such as “case management” will need to replace IT’s “incident management.” Importantly, these digitally-enabled capabilities are not simply the ability to move work between different groups, there’s also the need for automated routing, queue management, notifications and alerts, approvals, and service level targets to help ensure that work is moving efficiently – from the initial need through to the required outcome. It also includes self-service and self-help capabilities which provide a structured work intake method and the ability to “deflect” simple employee requests (including employees requesting updates on their requests) respectively.
3. Cross-capability enablers – These are capabilities that enable the employee-touching service management capabilities in #2 to work optimally. For example, knowledge management capabilities allow service providers to undertake work that’s outside of their individual experiences. It also enables the self-help capabilities that empower employees to help themselves to quicker solutions with a consumer-like service or support experience. Another example is reporting and analytics capabilities that not only help to ensure that operations and outcomes are meeting business needs and service-provider obligations but also help to identify improvement opportunities.
4. Platform-based capabilities – The ability to create business-function-specific workflows and applications that extend ESM beyond the core capabilities (that were designed for ITSM scenarios). This can cover both capabilities that are applicable to multiple organizations (perhaps even industry-specific) that are created by the tool vendor, its partner ecosystem, or the tool customer. And capabilities that are somewhat unique to your organization – a bespoke solution to a business need or opportunity. Either way, the ability for business function personnel, and not just IT’s application developers, to create these extended solutions using codeless drag-and-drop functionality is a key enabler in both rapid cross-enterprise tool success and benefits realization.
5. New technology adoption – These are capabilities that allow both individuals and teams to be better versions of themselves. Two timely examples are collaboration and machine-learning-based capabilities. In terms of the former, the aforementioned need for remote and socially distanced working requires digitally-enabled teamwork and wider collaboration capabilities. Whereas the latter offers a wealth of opportunities that allow business functions to be all three of “better, faster, cheaper.” Whether it’s the use of machine learning and automation to accelerate process operations and outcome delivery. For example, in intelligent request triage where the technology decides which group to route a request to based on historical data patterns and in the automated escalation of requests when circumstances change or a service-level breach is likely. Or the use of machine learning to share knowledge more effectively. This could be through the provision of automated recommendations to service-provider staff or context-based self-help knowledge provided to service requesters either via traditional portal searches or newer chatbot capabilities.

The above list of five things to look for in an Enterprise Service Management tool is not necessarily everything that your organization will need but provides a great start.  If you want to find out more about the opportunities of ESM and the tools that can facilitate this framework, check out our whitepaper below, Unlocking Enterprise Service Management with the Atlassian Platform.