The Need for Enterprise Service Management

Key takeaways 

• ESM is the practice of managing technology services to ensure that they meet the needs of the organization and its employees.
• It ensures services are delivered consistently, efficiently and cost-effectively – while meeting the needs of the business and customers.
• The benefits of Enterprise Service Management (ESM) include increased employee satisfaction, boosted employee engagement, reduced costs, increased efficiency and improved compliance.
• Comprehensive processes and automation help ensure your organization provides the highest quality of service to customers while optimizing available resources.
• There are four key components of an effective ESM strategy: clear goals and objectives, comprehensive processes, automation and monitoring and feedback.

Organizations today are becoming more reliant on technology to provide quality services to their employees. As a result, there is an increased need for Enterprise Service Management (ESM). 

What is Enterprise Service Management?

ESM is a set of processes and practices used for managing the delivery of an organization’s technology services. ESM ensures services are delivered consistently, efficiently and cost-effectively – while meeting the needs of the organization and customers.

Employees expect a similar experience in their day-to-day business life, whether they engage with IT or any of the many other service providers in a company. This includes human resources (HR), Legal, Facilities, project management, security, sales, marketing, R&D and finance departments.

Benefits of Enterprise Service Management

The benefits of Enterprise Service Management are numerous. Some of the most important include:

1. Improved employee satisfaction

ESM looks at how technology helps or hinders employees when doing the work they need to do - when they need to do it. ESM ensures services are delivered consistently and efficiently, leading to improved employee productivity and satisfaction. By providing clear expectations, enhancing communication and creating a sense of ownership, ESM enables employees to feel more engaged with the teams who are delivering the services they have requested.

For example, if an employee can see the status of a request, they know what stage it is in and when it can be expected to be finished This allows employees and business departments to focus more on providing business value and ensuring that IT boosts productivity versus hindering employee efficiency.

2. Boosted employee engagement 

Delivering an omnichannel experience across a self-service portal, Microsoft Teams, virtual agent, and email allows employees to choose the way they work that best fits their needs and preferences, increasing their engagement by providing an easy way to find and request information and services across a variety of modes.

3. Reduced costs 

ESM can help reduce costs significantly by streamlining processes and eliminating unnecessary complexity. Automation is key here; ticket classification, assignment and flexible workflows can be automated, ensuring the right team is handling the ticket from the beginning. This not only reduces costs but leads to improved efficiency and customer satisfaction.

4. Increased efficiency 

ESM helps increase efficiency and reduce errors by ensuring services are delivered on time and meet the organization's priorities. This can be achieved through standardized workflows, documented processes, automated assignments and interconnected systems, resulting in higher quality services across the organization.

5. Improved compliance

ESM enables organizations to meet industry regulations and standards. Through detailed auditing and reporting, organizations can ensure their compliance with service levels, security protocols and other regulations. This helps organizations protect their data and assets and gain 

a competitive advantage in the market by ensuring compliance with relevant regulations. 

Features of an effective Enterprise Service Management strategy

Employees expect easy and instant access to IT and non-IT services and automatic fulfilling of their requests.

While the IT service desk or help desk are top of mind when discussing service management, this is only one element for an ESM strategy. Some other key capabilities, which are an opportunity for introducing Enterprise Service Management to non-IT services, include:

• Self-service portal.
• Easy knowledge access.
• Ticket automation.
• Case management.

An effective ESM strategy must have four key components: 

1. Clear goals and objectives 

It is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of an organization's goals and objectives when it comes to ESM. This could begin with Human Resources (HR) or Facilities having an explicit idea of advantages. 

To start small, if email is the normal form of communication, it would make sense to incorporate automated email creation into the new ESM platform and implement the self-service portal or virtual agent as a second step.

However, it is even more important to enhance the backend processes by utilizing automation and workflow technology. This will allow for streamlined operations and more efficient processes, resulting in greater productivity. 

Additionally, having a well-defined ESM strategy helps ensure the organization keeps up with the ever-changing needs of the customer base and offers high-quality service all the time.

2. Comprehensive processes

From the initial design to the final delivery, ESM processes should be comprehensive and detailed, encompassing a wide range of service delivery stages. It is important to document and outline the services and processes that your organization plans to offer. These services and processes may be limited at first, but they will inevitably expand as your organization matures. 

Additionally, it is essential to identify the most significant processes that will give the best employee satisfaction and the highest efficiencies. Having comprehensive processes in place helps ensure your organization can provide the highest quality of service to the customers while optimizing the resources available.

3. Automation 

Enabling automation in your organization will streamline processes and reduce errors. Automatically assigning work to the right team will significantly reduce response and resolution time and improve turnaround time for customer requests. Workflows that automatically manage approvals, tasks and notifications help maintain high levels of accuracy and quality. 

Combining automation with existing manual steps will significantly improve the speed, accuracy and quality of organizational operations and improve the employee experience.

4. Monitoring and feedback

It is important to monitor the performance of ESM processes and provide feedback to ensure that they are meeting the organization's goals and objectives. To do this effectively, it is necessary to put in place dashboards, analytics and other reporting tools that will provide visibility into the team's workload and identify any imbalances or inconsistencies.

Monitoring will help you observe any trends or changes in workload, and measure how well service level targets are being met. This helps ensure that all organizational goals and objectives are achieved. Additionally, it gives managers the ability to make better decisions on how to adjust and prioritize resources accordingly.

The need for Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is becoming increasingly important as organizations become more reliant on technology to provide quality services to their employees.

ESM can help to reduce costs, improve employee satisfaction, and increase efficiency, while also ensuring that an organization is compliant with industry regulations and standards. An effective ESM strategy must include clear goals and objectives, comprehensive processes, automation, monitoring and feedback.

From improving employee satisfaction to significantly reducing cost, implementing an effective ESM strategy helps your organization stay productive and efficient in this new era of Everywhere Work. As IT’s responsibility for managing non-IT assets grows, ESM will help IT teams broaden their influence and deliver business value to the organization. Learn more about how Ivanti can help with your Enterprise Service Management strategy.