With much of the focus on digital transformation initiatives, businesses across industries are investing in Enterprise Service Management (ESM) software to help accelerate digital transformation.
According to research recently published by Information Service Group (ISG), in order to meet this demand, ESM providers are modernizing their platforms. “The proliferation of data and demand for new employee and customer experiences are making comprehensive ESM platforms essential for many companies,” Andy Miears, director, adaptive organization, with ISG, said in a press release.
Why Does ESM Matter?
Enterprise Service Management is a great way to organize and manage service requests in IT as well as in departments outside of IT. In an organizational setting, IT is rarely the only group that offers services. Take the facilities department as an example. If a shorted electrical outlet needs replacing or HVAC issues arise, facility personnel must be alerted so they can act.
No doubt, many institutions still rely on emails, phone calls or merely stopping and chatting in the hallway to communicate such things. These approaches can provide a certain degree of effectiveness in handling service requests. But let’s consider what is missing from that type of scenario – one where formalized service management processes are not in place.
- Accountability: Who is responsible for what? Are requests being completed on time? Without proper assignment and tracking processes, answers to these questions get very blurry.
- Visibility: Staff members seem busy and appear to be meeting responsibilities. But it is challenging and time-intensive to stop and precisely identify what is complete and what is still outstanding or even past due.
- Clarity: Decision-making and promises are likely going to be dictated by a hunch unless there is a big-picture view of where and when resources are allocated. Lack of clarity can lead to over-committing and, ultimately, disappointing stakeholders.
- Paths Toward Improvement: The status quo stands a high chance of going on unchanged when there is not a clear view of what is working versus what is not. It often takes highly visible process breakdowns to identify areas of improvement, leading to a perpetually reactive environment.
Enterprise Service Management systems fill in the gaps by addressing these areas, leading to higher efficiency, lower operational costs, improved service levels and increased satisfaction. Additionally, ESM provides a platform for users to search for information and resolve issues on their own using customized portals for each department. Each time an employee gets an answer or fixes something through self-service, that is one less request for service personnel to fulfill.
According to ISG’s report, when considering an ESM platform you should look for one that’s cloud-native, scalable, agile and customizable by non-programmers. These ESM platforms are low-code/no-code and include the ability to automate and integrate workflows. Ease of use is key, as this technology is expected to be deployed to groups like HR, marketing, sales, legal, finance and more.
Driving Digital Transformation with ESM
TeamDynamix ESM checks all of the boxes and integrates with iPaaS as well as TeamDynamix Conversational AI.
iPaaS is a codeless integration platform that includes out-of-the-box connectors to popular systems such as Workday, Office365, Active Directory, Amazon Web Services, and more.
With iPaaS, organizations can easily build integrations and automated workflows connecting various technology systems using a codeless, drag-and-drop visual workflow builder, streamlining the delivery of services even further. The platform can be used to facilitate integration and workflow around any ecosystem such as Salesforce for marketing, or HRIS for HR.
One of the key ways in which ESM can drive digital transformation is by enabling organizations to take a more holistic view of their services and processes. This can help them to identify areas where automation or other digital technologies can be used to streamline workflows, reduce costs and improve service delivery.
For example, by automating routine HR tasks such as onboarding or benefits enrollment, organizations can free up their HR staff to focus on more strategic activities such as talent development and retention.
A study from InformationWeek and TeamDynamix found that 33 percent of companies using ESM have an ESM tool being used by HR – this is one of the most common use cases.
According to the report, “HR offers some of the most obvious use cases for ESM and ITSM crossover, as many of the most used ITSM use cases often revolve around HR processes—namely around the onboarding and offboarding of employees.”
The report goes on, “These incoming and outgoing employees need to have accounts and permissions provisioned or de-provisioned for them on the IT side, but from an HR perspective, employees must have significant amounts of paperwork processed on their behalf and with their collaboration. ESM can help with that workflow. Similarly, ESM can simplify case management and HIPAA-compliant processes for HR. It can also offer a convenient single portal for all employees into HR, which is a department that collaborates heavily with stakeholders in every corner of an organization. When done right, ESM for HR can reduce inbound inquiries and improve employee response times by integrating workflows with HR systems.”
ESM in Action
At Pima County, there are plans to use automation (with iPaaS) both in IT and outside of IT to gain better efficiencies and reduce toil for employees.
Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, said “[Automation] is something the organization is really just starting to comprehend as a vision that we want to get to overall. My goal and hope is to make sure people understand the possibilities of workflow beyond just getting approvals routed because that’s all that we really do today.”
The county has started by automating user group management and the onboarding/offboarding of employees – a task that involves several departments.
“As a government organization we get audited by the state every year and they want to know what these stale accounts are doing sitting here,” Hayes said. “Offboarding is currently a very manual process – having to review the list from HR of people who are no longer employed with us and manually revoking their privileges from all the different systems and software and disabling their accounts. There’s absolutely no reason for that to not be automated.”
And all of the automation is going to save time and resources across the entire organization.
“The drudgery of working through mundane, repetitive tasks doesn’t exist just in IT,” Hayes said. “I think the more we can reduce toil within the departments that we support, the more people are going to buy in and understand the value of what we’re trying to achieve. There’s nothing like success to breed more success, and once other departments see the benefits they’re going to want these tools too.”
Casino Arizona and Talking Stick Resort have used an ESM approach to ITSM for years, recently making the switch to TeamDynamix to improve their ESM capabilities.
Independently owned and operated by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Scottsdale, Arizona, these casino and resort properties employ about 3,500 people altogether. For more than a decade, they’ve benefited from having a “one-stop” service portal that employees could use to request everything from housekeeping services to clean a room before a special event, to the purchase and provisioning of new technology or a security badge for a visiting vendor.
“We looked at a number of systems,” Adam Dunn, program manager, said. “In TeamDynamix, we found the one that was most user-friendly.”
With its “low-code, no-code” design, TeamDynamix is highly configurable, allowing organizations to create personalized service categories (both simple and complex) and build customized workflows for managing multistep processes.
In addition, the platform’s enterprise integration and automation capabilities allow IT staff to create customized integrations between TeamDynamix and other software programs using a simple, drag-and-drop flow builder. As a result, TeamDynamix customers can build workflows for automating almost any service function to fit their needs.
Finally, because TeamDynamix is easy to use and configure, it lends itself nicely to ESM and can be easily adopted by departments outside of IT. In housekeeping, for example, one of the areas the tool will be used to help with is resource capacity planning around events.
“We have an event space where we host a variety of different things,” Dunn said. “We’ll be using the tool to get out in front of these and schedule housekeeping for room cleanings before and after these events. All of these housekeeping requests can be scheduled and managed through a ticket. This allows our housekeeping department to see what events are upcoming that they need to plan for and staff appropriately. And if we have a performer coming into our nightclubs, a lot of times housekeeping is tasked with clearing space, so they can see when those requests come in and make sure the right resources are available.”
The Benefits of Using ESM to Drive Digital Transformation
ESM can help organizations to adopt a more agile approach to service delivery.
By breaking down silos and encouraging collaboration between teams, ESM can help organizations to be more responsive to changing business needs and customer demands. This can be particularly valuable in industries such as retail or healthcare, where customer expectations are constantly evolving.
Another way in which ESM can drive digital transformation is by helping organizations to adopt a more data-driven approach to service management.
By collecting and analyzing data on service performance, customer feedback and other key metrics, organizations can gain valuable insights into how their services are performing and where improvements can be made. This can help them to prioritize investments in digital technologies and ensure that they are delivering value to their customers.
Finally, ESM can help organizations to build a culture of continuous improvement.
By providing a framework for service management that is aligned with business objectives, ESM can help organizations to identify areas for improvement and implement changes more quickly and effectively.
This can be essential in the fast-paced, ever-changing world of digital business, where organizations need to be able to adapt quickly to stay ahead of the competition.
Want to learn more about the state of ESM? Check out the latest market study from TeamDynamix and InformationWeek: State of Enterprise Service Management.