9 Benefits of Enterprise Service Management to reinvent processes and create a bullet-proof organization

The post-COVID environment benefits an organization that adapts Enterprise Service Management which brings them one step closer to digital transformation. Before knowing why we say this and how it would help, it is crucial to understand how the Enterprise Service Management system works as a whole.

What is an Enterprise Service Management?
Enterprise Service Management is an extension of IT Service Management (ITSM) principles to support business teams, including Human Resources (HR), legal, facilities, marketing, and finance. In simple words, it is the application of ITSM capabilities and principles to other business domains to enhance operational performance, services, outcomes, and results. The end-to-end delivery of IT services to clients is managed by IT teams using ITSM. Creating a service desk that all teams inside the corporation may utilize is one example of ESM.

Importance of Enterprise Service Management

Companies and specific businesses are constantly looking to better their business strategies by improving processes and reducing costs. Organizations can achieve business results only by:

• Enhancing customer experiences and service excellence
• Increasing effectiveness and operational efficiency
• Lowering operating expenses
• Increased understanding of processes and results and the potential for improvement

Businesses are drawn to using Enterprise Service Management to increase the use of ITSM rather than other business process optimization techniques for various reasons.

These consist of:

Proved Benefits:
After more than 30 years of development, ITSM procedures are well entrenched and supported by extensive toolkits. Additionally, they have been shown to boost capacity and efficiency, provide greater accountability and control, and promote strategic company planning when correctly applied.

Quick ROI:
Expanding the scope of an existing system is far simpler than starting from scratch, which lowers cost and speeds up implementation. Since the roll-out procedure has already been implemented at least once (in the IT industry), you may use this knowledge to boost adoption rates and hit ROI goals more quickly.

Streamlined direction:
The IT department already uses and maintains the ITSM tools; thus, getting buy-in from IT stakeholders is simpler. The thorough examination of the advantages IT has received from ITSM also makes it simpler to build a solid business case for organizational change.

Technology Advancements:
Nobody is more demanding of software than the IT department; hence suppliers of ITSM tools usually develop their products more quickly and incorporate cutting-edge technologies to give more advantages than other software developers.

Integration skills.
A singular system that all the business units utilize for their tasks reduces the cost and time associated with integrating numerous business systems and tools.

All of the above is easily possible through implementing Enterprise Service Management within the existing systems.

Difference between ESM VS ITSM
An effective ITSM implementation enables businesses to capitalize on existing achievements and apply them to align all teams, standardize services, and simplify procedures. ESM picks and chooses the best of this long relied bunch of the ITSM principles in use.

ITSM assists IT teams in enhancing their performance, efficacy, responsiveness, and ability to measure it. It involves consciously applying ITSM principles to each department’s business requirements ensuring that everyone can communicate in the same language and receive assistance consistently.

• ESM is different even though it is based on ITSM best practices. The ITIL incident management concept of “adopt and adapt”—under which businesses only take what they need and customize it to meet those needs—also applies to ESM. This holds for the adopted procedures and practices and how they operate, including the terminology used.
• A few business units (outside of IT) would want to employ language from ITSM and ITIL incident management. In contrast, HR teams would prefer to refer to the former as “issue management.”
• Additionally, there is a case to be made that ITSM will be viewed as a specific type of Enterprise Service Management if it develops into an Enterprise-wide operational model.
• ITSM and ESM leverage knowledge management and occasionally (and only when it makes sense) incorporate some ITIL Incident Management processes to add value. This implies that you can implement a self-service portal to help streamline all operations using existing knowledge and procedures.
• While ESM and ITSM differ, they can often be managed with the same software, maximizing the return on investment for ITSM software.

Hence it is safe to say it is ITSM plus ESM rather than ITSM versus ESM.

Benefits of Enterprise Service Management

The benefits of ESM will rely on how thoroughly and seriously you use its principles. The following are typical advantages of deploying ESM across numerous organizational processes and departments:

Increased efficiency and speed.
By clearing up email inbox congestion, enabling quicker request processing, and enabling simple tracking of tickets throughout their lifecycle, work can proceed more swiftly and smoothly.

For the IT department, the opportunity to be recognized as a generator of value-adding innovation throughout the organization is the main benefit of ESM adoption. Because they are providing best practice service management operations rather than just enabling work through technology.

Additionally, the closer collaboration of the various business units enables the exchange of best practices outside of those covered by ITIL and other bodies of service management guidance.

Cost reduction and Growth in ROI for ITSM and ESM solutions.
The ROI substantially rises as additional business units use the same or comparable ITSM and ESM solutions.

Your firm can eliminate or automate low-value or non-value-adding operations by mapping and defining processes following best-practice guidelines. Additionally, allocate resources following known demands to avoid an unwelcome surplus task and related costs.

Client and Employee satisfaction via better alignment
The more closely aligned the expectations of customers and clearly defined duties of employees are in an organization, the more satisfied the customer(both internal and external).

For the internal workforce, this improvement is seen from two angles. First, by providing best-practice processes, clarifying expectations, enabling knowledge of their function in a wider context, and ensuring they have the necessary skills, training, and support to accomplish their jobs, ESM contributes to increasing the happiness of service-provider teams. Second, improved service receiver experiences result from better service provider operations (and a more motivated workforce).

Through a platform like Jira Service Management, when staff members begin to submit a ticket, suggested articles from the existing knowledge with helpful information are displayed, giving staff members the answers they require quickly and diverting tickets from busy teams.

When business functions are working together to support the vision and objectives of their organization, using a consistent operating model and a single workflow-enablement solution can help to align operations. ESM facilitates this by assisting in the breakdown of functional silos, facilitating simpler workflow between parties, and fostering communication and accountability. It also benefits staff members in each company function to observe how their work affects overall business operations and results.

Increased control and visibility.
To identify issue areas and improvement opportunities, a better level of visibility and tracking is made possible by well-established service management reporting techniques, metrics, and supporting technology. For instance, change management/enablement practices contribute to service continuity by reducing unanticipated consequences of any given change.

Management can monitor performance and progress and make essential choices as necessary, thanks to having a clear and comprehensive perspective of end-to-end operations across company functions. The detection of process inefficiencies or bottlenecks is all made possible by ESM, which also lays the groundwork for business intelligence applications.

Efficient handling of knowledge.
Business function teams can more readily capture and reuse knowledge by utilizing best practices for service management, enabling them to share learning from their prior work and answer requests more quickly and thoroughly. Ultimately, everyone gains knowledge management skills since it helps service and support workers do their jobs better and more rapidly for the clients they serve to receive better and faster service.

Greater stability
The ESM’s consistent operations and results make the capacity for precise forecasting and strategic decision-making. Enterprise Service Management strategies also assist in establishing a steady state in operations by improving service delivery quality and reliability and helping prevent mistakes or unexpected results that lead to delays, expenses, and dissatisfied clients.

Improved collaboration
ESM and the supporting technology facilitate collaboration for tasks that cross business functions, like onboarding new employees by streamlining communication, defining roles, and automating workflows and status updates. This includes keeping track of who is responsible for taking the following action and providing audit trails for review.

Improved team information exchange.
Information bases and employee self-service portals are examples of enabling technologies for ESM that establish centers for knowledge sharing and exploitation. This ensures that all teams have easy access to the most recent, reliable information regarding protocols, useful tools, services, or future events and may use it to their advantage.

Benefits for businesses:
The business-level advantages are, in many respects, the sum of the benefits of each business function. For instance, greater speed decreased costs, and enhanced satisfaction at a business team level also translate to corporate-level victories. However, some advantages must be consciously acknowledged at the organizational level, for instance:

• Greater competitive advantage thanks to improved business facilitation
• Flexibility and agility/change-speed improvements
• Agreed-upon accountabilities – inside and between teams
• Better risk management, governance, and compliance
• An all-encompassing strategy for continuous development.