How Moving To Enterprise Service Management Improves Your Bottom Line

By Satyen Vyas, CEO, Symphony SummitAI

In many large organizations, you have multiple departments–such as legal, human resources, finance and IT–each using their own, disparate systems and solutions for help requests, service appointments and more. In some, it might just be a mixture of email and phone communication without an actual system in place. This requires multiple technology investments and other resources needed to keep each of these departments running smoothly. It can be costly and convoluted. But what if each of these departments were using the same solution? A holistic approach to service management makes business sense from not only a cost standpoint, but also in terms of productivity and efficiency.

The Problem With A Siloed Approach

Enterprises are focused on delivering digital transformation and expertise to their customers, but what’s often missing is a change in the way internal processes are done. The employees within the enterprise often aren’t seeing the same kind of customer service that’s being delivered externally.

Many organizations are starting to recognize that lacking a cohesive solution across departments isn’t working. Employees wind up spending vast amounts of time chasing down answers and projects from other employees. That cuts down on productivity and on employee satisfaction.

Enterprise leaders need to help their employees to help their customers better, and at the same time, internal functions must be in place to enable transformation to happen within the enterprise itself.

Enterprise Service Management Brings It All Together

Employees have begun to expect the same sort of simplicity and ease of use within the workplace that they receive elsewhere in their lives as consumers.

Businesses started focusing on ITSM years ago, so there is a framework in place: ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), a best-practices framework for delivering IT services. The question now is:  How can this framework be applied to other functions? ITIL’s culture of service-level agreement (SLA) doesn’t usually exist in most of the other non-IT functions.

Any business transaction or function can be thought of in terms of the “service requester” and the “service deliverer.” That is, there’s the person who is asking for the task to be done – whether it’s a repair to a slow email system or payment on an expense report. The person whose job it is to respond to these types of queries can be thought of as the service deliverer.

There are two benefits to this model. First, there’s real value in it for employees, as it reduces frustration and improves the employee experience. Second is the agility and speed with which business operations can move through. The accountability is much higher, too, because there is a specific person who is tasked with delivering the requested service or task.

Enterprise Service Management Increases Efficiency And Productivity

Using the same service management systems across functions – IT, HR, finance and so on – enables the monitoring and control of risk, value, and cost. Enterprise service management (ESM) systems can track business resources, including people, parts, and assets. ESM provides an integrated view of core service business processes, often in real time. Data can be shared across departments, and the flow of information is better coordinated. In fact, administrators are able to build complex inter-functional workflows.

Forrester reports that departments using ESM improve their demand and execution management. They gain the ability to define internal SLAs. ESM enables administrators to flexibly configure services and SLAs at the granular level. The ESM’s intelligence and automation drive efficiency, leading to higher employee satisfaction scores at a lower cost.

You will have access to reports that are no longer full of siloed information but contain rich data analytics to highlight key problem areas and key success points. This information often yields important financial insights for more strategic decision making, as well as providing a greater level of data-driven operational control.

Toward A Streamlined Approach

Businesses today must move at digital speeds. Customers expect prompt service and issue resolution – including employees, who are really the business’s first customers. Yesterday’s expensive, piecemeal systems spread across the business must be replaced in order for companies to not only keep pace with competitors but innovate and surpass them. A comprehensive approach to ITSM—ESM—not only saves money and headaches but creates a more efficient and productive business environment.

About The Author

Satyen Vyas is CEO of Symphony SummitAI.