What Are the Benefits of Enterprise Service Management (ESM)?

Lately, you may have heard a lot about Enterprise Service Management (ESM) and even more about the value of carrying over established industry best practices from ITSM to serve greater functions of the business beyond simply IT. To start, it may be best to get a refresher about IT Service Management, ITIL, and their respective roles within the organization and business itself.

According to our own Frank App, IT Service Management (ITSM) can be described as:

“…a model or strategic approach for designing, delivering, managing and improving the way IT is used within an organization. The goal of ITSM is to ensure that IT services are aligned with the needs of the business and that the right processes, people and technology are in place so that the organization can meet its business goals. Simply put, ITSM is what you do to manage the services you deliver to your customers and the ITIL best practices and processes provide a framework that supports the development and management of effective ITSM.”

So, if we understand ITSM to be the foundation for positioning the IT organization as the chief service provider for aligning IT with the business, ESM essentially extends these services beyond the scope of IT into other core business functions. This is most applicable to enterprise services that have similar operational requirements as IT, such as: ticketing, workflows, automation, self-service, knowledge management, and more. It makes sense for these services to share the same framework and best practices for more uniform and efficient management across the entire enterprise.

Here are some enterprise services that may benefit from ESM capabilities and best practices:

• HR Onboarding
• Financial Services
• Legal
• Facilities
• Project Management
• InfoSec

Benefits of an ESM Model

With the rise of digital transformation in the IT space, the logical next step is for those same benefits of a digital automated service environment to carry over to other enterprise services. Some of these benefits include:

• A Better User Experience – ESM iterates on lessons learned from the consumerization of IT, and delivers a better all-around experience to organizations that deploy SaaS or self-service options for the various departments that make up the business. The end result is a more unified experience that’s easier for employees to use, quicker to access, and more efficiently automates routine tasks.
• Improved Efficiency – Traditional ITSM framework best practices such as ITIL were designed and refined to create processes that manage and deliver IT services in the most efficient means possible. Those same principles can often be applied to other services in the business – keeping operations flowing smoothly and reducing the amount of overhead costs.
• More Apt to Achieve a Successful ROI – Since ESM stems from the initial ITSM solution investment, the more functionality it can provide beyond its IT requirements, the more value it brings the business itself, thus achieving a better ROI.
• More Effectiveness – A carefully managed system based on ITSM best practices helps to ensure that employee requests and issues are facilitated through proper channels and are documented within the system itself. These capabilities will help departments such as HR evolve beyond home-grown processes of cataloguing loose emails and spreadsheets.
• More Control and Visibility Over Process – Clearly defined best practices around metrics, reporting, KPIs, workflows and ticket routing allows for enhanced visibility over the operations for departments outside of just IT. And by using change controls to regulate scheduled or unplanned changes, management can better maintain the stability of digital services and applications.

Enterprise Service Management is sure to pick up steam as more organizations make the shift toward digital transformation. Have any comments? Feel free to drop them below!