Expanding ESM Practices Across Departments: Enhancing Efficiency and Collaboration

IT Service Management (ITSM) is more than just basic IT support. Its main goal is to provide IT services to customers and ensure that IT teams handle the entire process from start to finish by providing high-quality services. ITSM is used in all departments of modern businesses because almost all teams rely on technology.

Since technology is used in many different departments of an organization, ITSM tools can be adjusted to meet the specific needs and workflows of each team. By adopting ITSM principles, frameworks like IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and ITSM tools, other departments can incorporate the best practices from ITSM and develop comprehensive and efficient Enterprise Service Management (ESM) strategies.

Learn from ITSM to break down Silos:

While IT Service Management (ITSM) focuses on managing IT services in an organization, Enterprise Service Management (ESM) takes the concepts of ITSM to non-IT departments’ business use cases to improve their service delivery and efficiency. By applying Enterprise Service Management (ESM) practices and tools, inspired by ITIL or similar frameworks, to various teams, organizations can streamline their processes and provide faster and more accessible support to employees. Departments like HR, marketing, sales, legal, and finance can improve support, visibility, and turnaround times by leveraging ESM.

In HR, for example, ITSM tools and principles better connect initially disjointed tools, allowing teams to hire new talent faster and improve end-to-end employee experience. In sales, where team members face increasingly demanding customer expectations, an ESM-embedded approach lets them “do more with less” by shortening sales cycles and strengthening back-office processes.  Blending ITSM with marketing improves marketing campaign support, approval turnaround times, and customer support integration resulting in new products getting to the market faster.

Ultimately, effectively mingling ESM with other departments allows organizations to stay competitive in today’s dynamic business landscape. 

Amplify Employee Experience: 

By implementing an ESM solution within the Human Resources (HR) department, numerous benefits can be gained to improve employee experience and HR processes. By utilizing ESM software that fosters collaboration with the IT department, the alliance between HR and IT grows stronger. Integrating an organization’s human resource information system (HRIS), such as Workday, Bamboo, or PeopleSoft, enables the automation of crucial processes like Employee Onboarding, Offboarding, and Transfers. This automation triggers requests across IT, Procurement, Legal, HR, and other teams, fostering seamless collaboration and cohesive workflows.

The streamlined process increased visibility, accelerated workflows, and fostered cross-departmental collaboration, ultimately improving the overall employee experience.

Enhancing marketing processes:

The Marketing team can greatly benefit from using ITSM tools and concepts to optimize their processes. By using ESM software, marketing tasks can be organized more effectively, collaboration can be improved, and workflows can become smoother. Marketing teams can leverage ESM principles and platforms like JSM (Jira service management) to create and manage their marketing campaigns, bring together team members from different departments on a single platform, manage tasks o run successful campaigns with milestones, create approval workflow for content approvals for visibility and accountability and more.
By using these ITSM tools and ESM processes, the Product Marketing teams can publish their marketing campaigns faster, keep their objectives clear, and minimize any delays by working together more efficiently across different teams.

Improving finance operations:

Using ITSM tools and principles can bring significant benefits to Finance departments, which have strict procedures and document requirements. ESM tools like JSM can help standardize communication, increase visibility, and connect processes throughout the organization. Leveraging JSM, finance teams can track accurate and up-to-date information, keep a record of requests, requests, and other documentation, support process reviews, and perform audits easier.

To make operations even better, finance departments can look to ITIL V3’s Financial Management framework for inspiration. This framework provides standardized processes for budgeting, accounting, and charging in IT services. It covers key areas such as financial support, planning, analysis, and reporting. ITIL Financial Management also offers suggested KPIs and other indicators to measure the processes of finance.

By adopting ESM practices and using ITSM tools, finance departments can make their operations more efficient, increase visibility, and improve accountability. This leads to better financial management, more accurate reporting, and a strong foundation for decision-making and compliance with regulations.

Shifting from IT Service Management (ITSM) to Enterprise Service Management (ESM):

By embracing ITSM processes, concepts, and tools, organizations can seamlessly transition to an ESM-centered model, propelling their digital transformation efforts. ESM offers key advantages to drive this transformation by allowing organizations to:

• Effectively communicate their services using consistent and unified ESM tools
• Break down organizational silos using a well-orchestrated workflow
• Drive efficiency through automation to reduce manual errors, enhance service delivery speed and boost productivity
• Streamlining control and governance to improve cost-effectiveness, reduce risk and increase governance for organizations.

If you’d like to learn more about implementing an ESM approach and solution in your organization, contact us now to get in touch with our ESM expert.