What Does Enterprise Service Management Look Like Outside of IT?

As more and more companies look to embrace a single platform approach to service management, it’s important for departments outside of IT to understand how codeless service management tools like IT service management (ITSM), project portfolio management (PPM) and enterprise integration and automation tools (iPaaS) can be used within marketing, HR, finance, facilities, etc.

The practice of applying service management principles and tools to departments outside is called Enterprise Service Management (ESM). Often, groups like HR and facilities are the first to jump in and start with ESM as they often have tickets and requests for projects that can easily translate to service management.

And if your organization is using a codeless service management tool – each of those departments can set up their own customized portals and workflows with automations to handle requests – whether that’s for a name change of new hire onboarding in HR, or a new work order or maintenance request in facilities for example.

But what does ESM look like in a department like marketing? Can ESM work there? The answer might surprise you.

Using ESM to Save Time, Stay Organized in Marketing

Marketing teams take requests from multiple departments throughout an organization every day. Those requests can range from mass emails to events, to communications, and more. The sheer volume of activity can be daunting – especially in larger organizations and businesses. And without formal a intake process and project planning/tracking – things can get lost.

Let’s take a brief look at some of the areas in which marketing teams could benefit from instituting a proper work management platform.

Project Portfolio Management/Event Planning

Perhaps one of the more daunting tasks for marketing is juggling the many different projects—whether it’s the creation of a new product, updates to the website, or running an event. Each activity comes with multiple dependencies and milestones.

By creating a project portfolio, the marketing team can gain increased control over timelines, resources and budgets. Create, manage, and view data from a database of proposed, planned, and ongoing projects, and leverage it to:

  • Prioritize projects and optimize the project portfolio.
  • Plan projects and manage the execution of approved projects.
  • Manage the supply and demand for project resources.
  • Manage the lifecycle of request ideas through project completion.
  • Integrate with work orders/service management platform.

Managing CRM Updates/Data Pulls

Marketing is often involved in updating the CRM or pulling out data that can be used for recruitment, advertising and promotion, customer/employee communications, and more. Requests often come via email and can be lost or misunderstood. Often, there isn’t even enough information in the email to execute the request the first time.

A proper form and workflow routing process can be used to ensure that all the right information is requested upfront and that the appropriate approvals are considered.

Workflow & Routing of Marketing Activities

Whether it’s landing page creation, expanding web copy or the need to draft a communication to employees or customers, the marketing team manages a lot of requests.

Offering a service catalog with detailed information and workflow can help expedite the handling of these types of requests – making sure they get to the right person so they’re handled appropriately and within the timeframe requested.

Serving Up Marketing Assets

If you’re in marketing, how many times do you feel like a human file server?

Requests for specific brochures, testimonials or videos come in via email or message all day long—imagine that you have a central repository for all materials right in the same portal used to submit requests to marketing or creative services.

By making using a well-organized, searchable portal anyone looking for marketing materials can come to the marketing portal and find them on their own – no longer needing to send you that message or email. 

Self-Service Portal

Speaking of portals, with requests coming in from all directions (and constantly), trying to organize and prioritize them can be overwhelming. Imagine having one centralized portal for all incoming requests that a marketing team may get involved in or is ultimately responsible for, such as:

  • Updates to the CRM
  • Email programs
  • Web revisions
  • Event planning
  • Press activity
  • Campus communications
  • Creative service requests
  • And more!

The same portal you use to host your marketing assets can also have the forms you create for these requests. If someone needs something from marketing, you can simply direct them to the portal where they can fill out the form, select what they need from the menu, fill in the details and submit.

Marketing then gets the request routed to them based on the parameters they’ve set and you can manage the projects and workflow from there. 

For Successful Adoption, ESM Needs to Be Easy to Use

As you can see, ESM can be a great addition to an organization. But in order to succeed, you need to get buy-in from everyone involved. To successfully implement an ESM platform throughout an organization, you need to think through use cases for each department and not assume everyone uses the same language and processes.

To be successful, each group needs a purpose-built solution. Simply taking the ITSM platform IT uses and trying to duplicate it in each department will not work. Each department needs to be able to ideate and create its own service solution WITHOUT dependency on IT. For this, you likely need a platform that is codeless.

If marketing wants to add a new service to the catalog, or a new request type or wants to create new content in the knowledge base – they should be able to do so without using IT resources. The goal of a good ESM platform is to be easy to use, easy to own and easy to operate.

Good ESM platforms provide:

  • Ease of use – Each department can manage its own service requests, content and workflows without the help of IT resources.
  • Dashboards – A specific view for each user type is helpful. If you are managing events and projects, you need to have a specific view of that versus someone managing work orders for facilities, or onboarding requests in HR.

In addition, when contemplating your ESM strategy, it’s important to consider the different ways you can combine your ESM with PPM and an integration and automation tool like iPaaS (integration platform as a service) to extend ESM even further.

For instance, a simple service request like a name change, may seem simple but in reality, it will require a series of rather mundane and manual steps – this could easily get automated. There are hundreds and hundreds of these types of activities happening all across your organization – all waiting to get automated. And with the right codeless ESM tool – you can manage all three from just one platform

To learn more about a single platform approach to managing processes and projects from a single platform for all departments check out: Smart Service Management: Working Better Together with a Connected Enterprise.

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