Organizations are constantly seeking ways to operate more efficiently, deliver better service, and remove administrative headaches. In an effort to keep up with ever-changing service expectations, modernization efforts centered around IT Service Management (ITSM) are moving beyond the IT department, signaling a major shift toward Enterprise Service Management (ESM).
During a recent discussion, Andrew Graf, Chief Product Officer at TeamDynamix, and Doug Foster, CIO at the South Carolina Department of Commerce, explored how AI, automation, and no-code solutions are driving this modernization, leading to measurable success and organizational alignment.
The Evolution: ITSM to Enterprise Service Management (ESM)
The initial phase of modernization for many organizations remains foundational, involving adopting frameworks like ITIL, implementing basic knowledge management, and managing simple workflows. However, the next critical step is modernization, which involves entering the realm of Enterprise Service Management (ESM).
ESM takes established service management principles, traditionally used in IT, and extends them to other departments such as HR, marketing, and facilities. This is vital because these other areas also need effective ways to manage work and deliver services.
Why ESM Matters
ESM allows an entire organization to operate more fluidly. It ensures that as work flows across departments, there is a similar vernacular and set of tools and processes used. Crucially, this is achieved without forcing “IT speak” onto departments like HR or Facilities, which can otherwise inhibit progress.
Foster shared that his team turned to ESM because they struggled with visibility into requests made to groups like Marketing or HR, leading to miscommunication and uncertainty about status or completion time.
“To address this, we implemented some basic workflows, and the cost/benefit was insane,” Foster said. “It didn’t take much to implement, but the benefits were a game-changer for these departments that didn’t have the structure and processes for request management like we had with ITSM.”
Now there is visibility into requests across all departments, and workloads are better managed as a result.
The key benefits realized include:
- Consumer Visibility: The person requesting the service gains clarity on where their request is and how long it will take.
- Provider Workload Management: Departments like Human Resources gain better visibility into what people are asking for, which services are most used, turnaround times, and who their biggest internal customers are. Previously, this information “just went into the ether,” Foster said.
- Data-Driven Justification: Post-implementation, departments can “mind the data” and use real requests and usage statistics to build business cases, such as the HR department justifying a new position based on real data rather than just internal complaints.
“[Moving to ESM] has been phenomenal for us,” Foster said. “We’re looking for more and more opportunities to roll this out further within the agency.”
Laying the Foundation: Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
Foster’s organization notably started their journey with Project Portfolio Management (PPM). They recognized pain at the enterprise level due to “loose cannon kind of initiatives,” he explained, along with a lack of visibility, and resources being way overcommitted (e.g., the same person assigned to six different projects).
“We had issues where the same person was assigned to six different projects and that sort of thing,” Foster explained. “It felt like, for us, that PPM was sort of the top of the funnel, the place where we had to get things under control first.”
For the South Carolina Department of Commerce, getting started here included establishing a feasibility team to review project ideas and move viable ones into a prioritization process.
This change of perspective—realizing the need to track all resource consumption across the entire agency, not just IT—was a major step in maturity and made discussions more business-centric and strategic.
“This has really changed the way we think about work coming into the whole organization; it’s really become a much larger discussion about what our real strategic priorities are and how we can keep people focused on them,” Foster said.
The key value of PPM lies not just in managing an individual project, but in the ability to plan, prioritize, and show an executive view and resource capacity view for the entire portfolio. This allows leaders to have fact-based conversations with stakeholders, pushing back on unreasonable expectations or demonstrating the need for more resources (like consultants or new hires).
The Power of Automation, AI, and No-Code
Modern service management heavily relies on integrating AI and automation to improve practices and remove headaches. A great place to start with automation is those tasks that are time-consuming, disliked, error-prone, or require near-real-time completion.
Studies indicate that without automation, IT team members may spend two to three months a year doing repetitive, low-value activities, which also contributes to staff attrition.
“ESM has helped up with finding places to automate,” Foster said. “If you think about it, there are processes that are very cross-functional, like onboarding and offboarding. These are great places to start.”
Top Automation Targets
Offboarding and onboarding are ideal for automation because the process usually involves a number of different departments, affects the new team member’s experience, and carries significant risk if not handled appropriately.
For the South Carolina Department of Commerce, automating both processes has been beneficial, especially offboarding.
“It’s not a good thing if people are carrying credentials that no longer work for the organization,” Foster said. “It’s really simple for something like that to fall through the cracks, so for us, that’s been massive. We’ve been able to improve security by automating the offboarding process.”
Other examples of successful integration and automation include:
- Intune Integration: Connecting asset management systems like Intune to the service management platform. Foster said the TeamDynamix implementation consultant was able to use the pre-built Intune connector to populate all assets, serial numbers, makes, and models within TeamDynamix in just five minutes, cutting a huge chunk of implementation time. This integration also allows technicians to take common actions (like restarting a device) directly from the asset record without leaving their service management tool.
- Testing Scripts in Workday: Workflows can be designed to call an integration automation platform (iPass) with connectors (like Workday connectors) to run testing scripts automatically upon reaching a certain stage in a change ticket.
- ERP Data Mapping: TeamDynamix iPass (Integration Platform as a Service) can map and transform fields from one ERP system to another, automating data entry.
Conversational AI and Execution
For AI to be truly valuable in service management, it must offer more than just answering questions based on static content. Great AI has powerful integration and automation capabilities. The conversational AI must be able to execute actions—such as processing a name change, provisioning software, or starting an onboarding process—through a conversational interface.
The results of combining conversational AI and automation are significant:
- 30% to 70% reduction in inbound tickets that reach a technician’s desk.
- 40% to 90% reduction in resolution times when technicians use an AI assistant for guidance.
“If you can deflect that many tickets from your help desk, and your satisfaction has gone up, think about what that can do for your team and organization,” TeamDynamix’s Graf explained.
The Critical Role of No-Code
The success of modernizing ITSM and implementing ESM hinges on choosing a platform that prioritizes a no-code approach.
The biggest challenge with highly customized service management systems is not the initial build, but the ongoing “care and feeding” and total cost of ownership (TCO). A no-code tool ensures that departments outside of IT, like HR and Marketing, can build forms, workflows, and manage changes themselves without relying heavily on IT resources.
This is especially critical in the ESM space, where a technical workforce is not always available. Systems that are easy to maintain and manage reduce the need for an “army of software developers” and allow organizations to focus their FTE money on delivering service, not just maintaining the system.
“What we’ve found with TeamDynamix is that there’s not much care and feeding needed,” Foster said. “The pieces all fit together and are extremely well integrated. We didn’t need to do a ton of integrating to different platforms, but the ones that we have – it’s seamless.”
Realizing Rapid Benefits: The Flywheel Effect
For those thinking about starting the journey, Foster’s advice is clear: “Do it sooner.”
“We were really naïve, walking in, to just how quickly you can get benefits from a system like this,” Foster said. “From our perspective, we were thinking ‘gosh, we could have done this a year or more ago and just think of all the benefits we could have reaped in that time frame’.”
In the end, his team implemented PPM, ESM, and ITSM in a 10-month timeframe.
The path to ESM often begins with the “crawl, walk, run” approach.
Once one department outside of IT adopts ESM, success is often contagious. When other departments and their leadership see how much better things are (moving away from spreadsheets or custom-built legacy tools), it starts a “flywheel” effect, generating rapid interest and momentum across the organization.
To learn more about the South Carolina Department of Commerce’s ESM journey, check out the full webinar: