Enterprise Service Management solutions are beginning to make their way into every part of the organizational structure, breaking down silos and improving how teams work. Service Management uses IT Service Management (ITSM) capabilities in other business functions to improve operations and outcomes.
The best way to understand how Enterprise Service Management solutions can transform your organization is to discuss the value that a Service Management approach brings to your teams.
3 Benefits of a Service Management Approach
While Enterprise Service Management might still be relatively new in people's minds, despite being a "thing" for over a decade, ITSM has been evolving for over three decades. There are many reasons for its success, including the following benefits that apply to both ITSM and Enterprise Service Management scenarios:
- Service-based thinking moves service providers from a supply view of the world to a demand-based view. This allows them to be better aligned with business wants and needs, including consumer-like services and support.
- The use of best practice Service Management guidance – using ITSM bodies of knowledge such as ITIL 4 – helps service providers to optimize their service delivery and support capabilities. After all, we've discussed how ITSM and ITIL aren't that different. This framework will help your business function to be all three of "better, faster, cheaper" in terms of the better operations:
- Providing better outcomes and service experiences
- Realizing efficiency gains and reduced operational costs.
- The consistency of operations leads to better outcomes and helps to improve employee morale and satisfaction.
These benefits are all then enabled and enhanced by using fit-for-purpose technology in the form of an ITSM tool that offers capabilities such as digital workflows, self-service, service request catalogs, knowledge availability, automation, and orchestration, collaborative abilities, and anytime and anyplace access.
Enterprise Service Management not only delivers optimized capabilities and a better service experience but also allows the service provider/receiver "dynamic." Service provider capabilities are now designed around the employee's needs rather than individual corporate service providers, such as human resources (HR), facilities, IT, etc.
6 Benefits of Using an Enterprise Service Management Tool
There are many enabling capabilities provided by an Enterprise Service Management tool, as outlined earlier, that can be directly translated into benefits for service requesters, service provider staff, and your organization as a whole. For example, employing fit-for-purpose technology allows you to:
- Facilitate the optimization of practices/processes and the people that work within them. The available digital workflows allow work to flow faster, as do technology-enabled knowledge management capabilities. This results in better outcomes and experiences, with associated productivity improvements for both service provider staff and the people they're serving.
- Offer a greater choice of access and communication channels to employees. With consumer-like omnichannel support available via chat (and chatbots) and self-service/help capabilities as well as the traditional telephone, email, and potentially "walk-up" channels. The use of self-service/help capabilities also increases the speed of resolution and minimizes the associated business function "handling" costs.
- Help manage demand for service and support. With self-help and chatbots, along with knowledge management, in particular offering the opportunity to deflect new requests and calls for status updates.
- Provide greater visibility into business function operations and performance, with the ability to better understand what has been achieved and what still needs to be accomplished. Plus, the identification of continuous improvement opportunities across operations, services, outcomes, and employee experience.
- Offer improved collaboration capabilities. Making it easier for work to be passed between, or worked on collectively by, various people and even across teams in different business functions.
- Provide a better return on investment (ROI) for the corporate ITSM tool. The more the ITSM tool – or what now might be called an Enterprise Service Management tool – is used to save time and money, the better the ROI for the tool.
- Incident management via Atlassian Opsgenie. Now integrated into the premium version of Jira Service Management, Opsgenie is a dedicated incident management tool with features that aim to bring all the people and information together rapidly to swarm an incident in progress (imagine anything from IT incidents, to PR nightmares, to timely sales opportunities). With a dedicated war-room for team communication, incident ticket amalgamation, on-call notifications, and other great features for resolving incidents as efficiently as possible.
ESM & AI
In addition to the traditional people and process technology-enablement, the growing availability of artificial intelligence (AI)-based capabilities in enterprise service management tools provides even higher levels of available benefits. For example, through intelligent automated ticket triage or chatbots as the first customer touchpoint. The impact of AI on enterprise service management will be covered in more detail in a future blog.
To Wrap Up
As you can see, the benefits of employing an Enterprise Service Management tool cover a broad spectrum of areas that impacts overall organizational performance. Like you, we examined business professionals about their adoption and thoughts regarding Enterprise Service Management tools. You can download the 2021 State of Service Management report here. Additionally, if you're still unsure if you should be calling it ITSM, ESM, or SM, you can check out this blog.
If we've convinced you that Enterprise Service Management tools can help you reduce friction, increase transparency, and increase your return-on-investment, then reach out, and we'll be in touch.