The current buzz around IT service management (ITSM) has led to the atomization of important processes and functions in small, medium, and large enterprises. This tool has also made it easy for information technology professionals to provide customers with end-to-end IT facilities. However, the application of ITSM concepts doesn’t cover all areas of your organization.
Therefore, you need to make use of the available enterprise service management tools to improve the performance and efficiency of your enterprise. Enterprise service management (ESM) extends ITSM best practices to other areas of your organization including the finance and sales departments. If you are planning to implement the ESM concept in your organization, make sure you are guided by the existing enterprise service management principles.
What Is Enterprise Service Management?
Before you start implementing the ESM concept and practices, it’s important to understand what it is and how it works. It’s also important to understand the possible enterprise service management challenges and the available solutions. In simple terms, enterprise service management is the process of applying the ITSM concept to other areas of your enterprise to improve its performance and effectiveness in service delivery.
It’s important to mention that ESM extends the service management concept from IT practices such as automated workflow, knowledge management analytics, and ticketing to other roles, including sales, finance, HR, among others. Also, ESM includes a platform, a service catalog, and a user’s portal. It helps to accelerate innovation and service delivery by automating all key functions through PaaS or low-code development tools.
Why Is Enterprise Service Management Important?
First, understand that there’s nothing like enterprise service management vs ITSM. It’s enterprise service management plus ITSM. By implementing ITSM, you help your organization to build upon its successes and unify all your teams, while standardizing your services. It’ll also help you to streamline your workflow. ESM, on the other hand, adopts some of the existing ITSM principles that have been relied on by information technology experts for many years.
For instance, ITSM has proved to be very effective in improving an organization’s performance, efficiency, receptiveness, and ability to evaluate its success. Therefore, ESM doesn’t just duplicate the existing ITSM principles; it adopts these principles to meet each department’s unique needs. Another objective of adopting these principles is to ensure that everyone in your organization speaks the same language and has full access to the necessary support in a timely and consistent manner. Here are some of the main ESM principles to guide you when implementing ESM in your enterprise.
Direct Access to Information and Support
These principles are naturally suitable for the service delivery of your enterprise, especially in knowledge management. By implementing ESM for knowledge management, you’ll ensure that your team members have direct access to information without relying on other members of your organization. This improves your productivity and effectiveness because your team members don’t have to waste time going through various departments to access the information they need. With a single integrated portal, everyone, from assistants and CEOs, will have direct access to support and requests.
Efficiency
A good ESM platform should be able to streamline your enterprise, ensuring that your service delivery is efficient. For instance, if all tickets are directed to your service desk, they should land to the intended team or individual directly. Also, a good ESM platform should ensure that every ticket that goes to your service agent is handled effectively on the first contact. With streamlined service delivery, your enterprise will minimize time wastage and ensure better efficiency in all departments.
Enhanced User Experience
IT professionals believe that the use of IT will become more complicated soon, especially for IT experts. However, new IT service management programs are expected to improve and modernize the user experience. This advancement will be beneficial for both the user and the service desk agent. Your employees want to solve problems at work with the same degree of flexibility they enjoy at home. Fortunately, the ESM platform introduces a self-service technology combined with a vast database of knowledge management to allow your IT experts to solve problems quickly. This also increases your employees’ satisfaction and productivity.
Automation of Complex Processes
With the right ESM tools, you’ll be able to automate even the most complex processes in your organization. This helps to reduce instances of guesswork and human errors in your enterprise, which can easily result in huge losses. Through automation of important processes, you’ll create fewer entry points, thus reducing the chances of broken data.
Lastly, the application time and cost are very important when choosing your ESM tools. Implementing ESM is an important part of streamlining critical processes in your organization and it can also be part of an overall change in approach when it comes to creating new processes.
