You’ve done the research and found a flexible, easy-to-use IT Service Management (ITSM) tool for your IT department to use – but now you want to scale it to groups outside of IT. What do you do? This is a question many organizations face when trying to implement a full Enterprise Service Management (ESM) strategy across their organization. When done right, there are many benefits to ESM including accountability, visibility, clarity and the ability to clearly identify areas for improvement. But getting ESM buy-in can be tricky.
To start, you should make sure that your ESM platform allows each department to ideate and create its own service solution without the need for IT support. For this, it’s recommended you use a codeless platform. Codeless platforms are more approachable for groups outside of IT that may not have the skills or abilities to code.
For example, your marketing department should be able to add a new service catalog, a new request type, or create new content in the knowledge base without needing to put in a ticket to IT.
A good ESM platform should be easy to use, easy own and easy to operate.
Language Matters
Too often, IT teams will introduce ESM to an organization to get rid of the many different solutions being used by various departments and to provide the user base with a one-stop service platform. This can lead to friction as the terminology used in IT doesn’t scale with use cases in other departments.
For example, in IT you “Submit a Ticket” if there is an issue. However, if the same platform is being used for HR and they want to address something like renewing a security badge “Submit a Ticket” might be confusing as the call to action for employees. Instead, you’d need a button that says something like “Submit Security Badge Renewal.”
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 an ITSM platform and trying to duplicate it in each group will not work.
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.
When done right, there are many benefits to ESM including accountability, visibility, clarity and the ability to clearly identify areas for improvement.
How to Get ESM Buy-In
Here are a few practical dos and don’ts for implementing an ESM solution that is built specifically for each department or group in your organization:
- Don’t just take an ITSM platform being used within your IT department and try to scale it across each group. It won’t work.
- Do meet with each department or group prior to implementing an ESM solution and settle on the processes and functionalities they need.
- Don’t assume that each department has the same language as IT for each process. Marketing might not use the terminology “submit a ticket” for example.
- Do ask each group or department for a list of their commonly used terms and how they correspond to the actions they’ll be taking when using the ESM platform.
- Don’t overcomplicate or try to over-process the ESM platform.
- Do make your ESM accessible and easy to use. For an ESM implementation to be successful, you’ll want departments and groups to be able to fully utilize the platform WITHOUT reliance on IT for support.
Incorporating Automation and Integration with Enterprise Service Management
When contemplating the use of automation and integration as part of a broader Enterprise Service Management (ESM) strategy, it’s important to consider the different ways a tool like iPaaS (integration platform as a service) can be used 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 the enterprise – all waiting to get automated.
At Winston-Salem University Derrick Hargrove and his team in the Office of Information Technology, are using iPaaS to automate processes throughout the University that directly impact service resolution times whether in IT, the Office of the Registrar, the financial aid office or human resources. Hargrove said the university started building iPaaS workflows to address various challenges they had with both system access and access to various apps and software provided to students, employees and faculty at the university.
“By creating these workflows within iPaaS we are able to save a significant amount of time,” Hargrove said. “Previously we’ve had situations where system access has held up a ticket so having the automated approval and access granted through iPaaS has helped us avoid those issues. And when you have people who need certain access or software to do their jobs, it’s nice to be able to provide that almost instantaneous resolution. It’s been a big win for us.”
The university has flows in place to grant system access based on different groups within Active Directory. Those same groups are utilized to run flows to grant access to things like Microsoft Teams and Adobe Creative Cloud.
At Pima County, they are using iPaaS to automate several processes throughout the county, including onboarding and offboarding in HR.
The county’s goal is to have new employees arrive on day one with everything they need to get to work, “You don’t need to waste so much time when it comes to onboarding,” Hayes said. “It really is such a sour experience for a new hire to come in, in this day and age, and sit around for three days waiting on their computer to show up. We need to get out of that mode and iPaaS is going to help us do that.”
In addition, using iPaaS to automate offboarding will save countless hours for a process that is normally very manual and heavily audited as Pima County is a government entity.
“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. iPaaS is going to help us a lot with this and save us time.”
Want to learn more about how to analyze IT service management platforms for your business? Check out: ITSM Software – What to Look for When Shopping for a New ITSM Platform.
This post was originally published in January 2021 and has been updated with new information.