As businesses and organizations work towards digital transformation CIOs are expected to be at the forefront, driving innovation and business success. Among the myriad of tools and strategies at their disposal, one stands out for its potential to revolutionize service delivery: Enterprise Service Management (ESM).
The Strategic Advantages of ESM
ESM is not just another buzzword in the IT world. It’s a powerful approach that extends the principles of IT Service Management (ITSM) across an entire organization to departments like human resources (HR), marketing, facilities, finance, legal and more. By doing so, it streamlines processes, enhances service delivery and, ultimately, increases customer satisfaction.
Improved Service Delivery
One of the core benefits of ESM is the improvement in service delivery. With ESM, services can be delivered faster and more efficiently, reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction. This is achieved through automation, standardization and integration of services, freeing up resources and allowing teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
Just think about how your current processes are set up. We’ve all worked at places where they still rely on emails, phone calls or merely stopping and chatting in the hallway to communicate project requests and more.
Sure, 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. However, 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.
Streamlined Processes
Adopting ESM means streamlining processes across the whole enterprise. This includes everything from request management to incident management. By integrating these processes, organizations can eliminate silos, improve communication and increase productivity.
A great use case for ESM is onboarding and offboarding employees. Both of these processes are multi-step and usually involve multiple departments. With the right ESM tool, you can easily integrate different systems and build out automations for many of the tasks that make up onboarding/offboarding. Without ESM, it can be difficult to keep everyone on the same page and ensure a smooth process.
At Pima County, AZ they are using TeamDynamix ESM to automate onboarding and offboarding.
“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.”
Increased Customer Satisfaction
When services are delivered efficiently and processes are streamlined, the end result is increased customer satisfaction. Happy customers are more likely to remain loyal, provide positive feedback and promote your brand – all crucial factors in today’s competitive marketplace.
And those customers can be your own employees – as well as former employees, as is the case with Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU).
GRU has used TeamDynamix’s integration and automation capabilities within the ESM platform to solve a key IT support challenge that affected thousands of retirees.
The software that handles payroll for GRU employees is Workday, which is supported by Gainesville’s IT department along with the other applications used by the city. Retired GRU employees receive their pensions through Workday as well.
However, prior to TeamDynamix, if retirees weren’t getting their pension checks or had trouble with their Workday account, they couldn’t submit a service request using GRU’s online service portal. Because retirees are no longer city employees, they don’t have an Active Directory account, and they need an Active Directory account to submit tickets to IT support staff online.
GRU Business Systems Analyst Tristina Grywalski worked with the TeamDynamix implementation and process consulting teams to develop a simple solution to this problem using the platform’s flexible configuration options.
As a result of their efforts, GRU retirees no longer have to call IT support staff during normal business hours, wasting valuable time for retirees and support staff alike. Instead, they can use the online service portal just like current employees with an Active Directory account can, resulting in faster and better service.
In just the first two months of this capability alone, more than 150 retired GRU employees from all across the country had submitted service requests online. “The service team is very grateful for this solution,” Grywalski said, noting that it has allowed them to be more efficient in resolving people’s problems.
Future-Proofing Your Organization
As we move further into the digital age, flexibility and resilience are becoming increasingly important. ESM provides a framework for continuous improvement, allowing organizations to adapt to changing demands and stay ahead of the game.
For CIOs looking to drive business success and enhance customer experience, embracing ESM is an invaluable strategy. Not only does it offer immediate benefits in terms of improved service delivery and streamlined processes, but it also positions the organization for long-term success in the ever-changing landscape of the digital age.
Want to learn more about how other businesses are using Enterprise Service Management? Check out our market study with InformationWeek: State of Enterprise Service Management.