In 2021, 80% of organizations had accelerated their digital transformation strategies due to the pandemic (Source: 2021 State of Service Management Report). In addition, the rise of the remote-working employee, in particular, has necessitated the need to replace manually-reliant ways of working with digital workflows that better suit the parameters of distanced working.
IT Teams across the globe have had to advance their adoption of digital-first practices and processes to enable as much of the global workforce to work from home. As a result, many of those teams have implemented ITSM (IT Service Management) practices and are beginning to use a similar framework across their organization: enterprise service management. Learn the 6 benefits of implementing enterprise service management or ESM tool.
Enterprise service management uses IT service management (ITSM) principles and capabilities (including the ITSM tool) by other business functions to improve operations, service, experience, and outcomes – offers a ready-made solution for this corporate need for digital workflows.
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So, how do you implement a tool historically used by IT across a broad and diverse organization?
Selling Enterprise Service Management to the Wider Business
An important thing to appreciate when selling enterprise service management to the broader business is that the name will not resonate with the business functions looking for digital workflows and perhaps more overall digital transformation capabilities to solve their pandemic-related challenges. Another is that the IT personnel selling the value of enterprise service management to business colleagues need to “stay out of the weeds” – focusing on the outcomes rather than the minutia of ITSM.
Focus on the needs of the individual business function(s). If valuable, these can be matched to specific enterprise service management benefits – that sit under the umbrella of “better, faster, cheaper” – such as:
- Optimized operations through best-practice digital workflows and other digital enablement capabilities
- Improved employee and customer experience and satisfaction
- Greater speed of operations and outcome delivery
- Increased employee productivity – for both service requesters and service providers
- Reduced costs – at both an operational and business level
- Increased agility and scalability – especially with automation reducing the reliance on manual operations
- Better meeting governance, compliance, and legal or regulatory requirements; plus, improved risk mitigation
- Greater insight into operations, services, experience, and outcomes, plus improvement opportunities
- Amplified workflow benefits through the use of AI-enabled capabilities
Each of these benefits should be described in business function examples and terms, mapping to the business function needs to be provided—for example, the ability for HR personnel to collaboratively work on employee onboarding tasks while geographically distanced. For example, this blog shows how a legal team benefits from implementing enterprise service management. The above is a long and involved benefits list; it might be best to start with a punchy “What’s in it for you,” which could be your “elevator pitch” for enterprise service management. Then, hopefully, you’ll know what’s best to promote in the context of your organization and its challenges – with perhaps the need to tweak it slightly for each business function based on your knowledge of their specific requirements.
If you would like to learn more about the benefits of enterprise service management and how to best sell it within IT and the broader business, then reach out, and let’s start talking.
