Enterprise Service Management: A key ingredient to uninterrupted IT
A never-ending global pandemic and the Great Resignation that shows no sign of slowing down, have made one thing very clear. In order to sustain in a volatile environment such as what’s being witnessed, organizations must level up their IT game to ensure the business runs smoothly and deliver a delightful employee experience every step of the way.
To simply put, uninterrupted IT is the need of the hour for unstoppable business.
In a recently concluded session at the Be Unstoppable virtual summit, Nirmal Krishnamoorthy, Senior Manager – Product Marketing at Freshworks, and William McKeon-White, Analyst at Forrester Research, explained why extending traditional service management beyond IT is the right step in the direction for organizations to solve this dual dilemma. You can catch the on-demand session here.
So, what does the state of ESM look like in 2022 and how is it helping organizations in keeping the business lights always on? Continue reading to find out.
The state of Enterprise Service Management
Most organizations are moving towards ESM. A Forrester Modern Technology Operations Survey in 2021 found that 65% of respondents have said they have implemented an enterprise service portal in their organization. The survey also highlighted that 28% of respondents are very much interested in adopting an enterprise service portal within their organization.
To adapt to the new normal, people have to come to the realization that there’s a need to change the way work is done. Respondents from the aforementioned survey expect a 300% increase in permanent full-time remote work.
Since work isn’t going back to the way it was, IT is going to be critical for this new way of working in the future. And ESM will be at the forefront to enable this.
Why Enterprise Service Management and how’s it helping
Technology is the intermediary of basic productivity. From gathering information on a prospect to talking to a coworker, technology plays a huge role in making things happen. Think about it. Every possible action an employee can take at work is intermediated by technology. From onboarding employees to filling a time off request, technology underpins all types of work in the workplace. But as witnessed during the pandemic, the changes in the workplace have left a gap in non-IT functions adapting to the new normal. The lack of a unified system to oversee functions across the enterprise has left organizations struggling to provide value to their employees and customers.
Thankfully, there are many ways how ESM is solving these problems to help organizations overcome the challenges of the new normal:
- Better workflows: Workflow Automator allows you to automate all the repetitive tasks and manual processes that you perform on a daily basis This way, you see how things should go and get articulated when processes are being executed.
- Integrations: ESM enables systems to interact with the other critical systems at work in order to remove the manual intermediate steps. This way, employees don’t face any interruptions they otherwise would.
- Automation: Automation is a complementary effort to both workflows and integrations. More standard steps are set in place to reduce manual work.
- Predictable fulfillment: For a company with several hundred service requests coming in per day, it gets tough for IT to manage all requests within the predetermined time window. With ESM in place, you have the ability to predict when work gets complete which takes the guesswork out of full filling service requests.
- Flexible asset tracking: Leveraging a single, unified platform to manage your asset lifecycle enhances IT governance and reduces IT costs by improving asset life with proactive maintenance.
Enterprise Service Management and employee experience
Technology satisfaction is good for both employees and businesses. Lower absenteeism, higher customer satisfaction, and higher profitability mean your business is thriving. Technology experience is a shared responsibility. And by extending your ITSM to your other departments, you can quickly deploy and extend your implementation and get new departments onboarded quickly to use the solution. Here are some ways how ESM enhances employee engagement and experience at the workplace:
- A single service and knowledge source.
- Unified demand management and demand insights
- Increased support transparency
- Reduced support seeking time
- Increased support reliability
- Increased flexibility for SMEs to provide for their function
- Automation facilitation
Final thoughts
As organizations increasingly make the shift to digital business models, IT is expected to be agile, innovative, and digital-first to keep up with new technology drivers dictating business success.
