Earlier this month, we attended the Service Desk Institute Conference 2016 (SDI16) held at the Hilton Metropole in Birmingham. It was quite an exciting and thought-provoking couple of days with a busy schedule of speakers, suppliers and thought leaders from across the globe. Geoff Rees, our Director of Business Services and Sales described it as an “upbeat andoptimistic event” where we had the opportunity to meet with individuals from diverse industries and discuss with them their service management requirements and in particular how these are significantly evolving. Clearly evident from the conversations we had with the delegates was that ‘Enterprise Service Management’ is now a reality.
What exactly is Enterprise Service Management (ESM)?
In his article, The Perfect Storm Driving Enterprise Service Management, ITSM expert Stephen Mann describes it as
“The use of ITSM principles and capabilities in other business areas to improve performance and service.”
Service management requirements are not tied to a particular team/department anymore. As part of the perpetual drive towards business efficiency, companies are looking for the right partner with the right solution that can cater for multiple areas within an organisation. It is no longer about purchasing a service management solution per department, but one solution for an entire organisation.
Who benefits?
Businesses are looking for a specific solution that can not only support just IT centric processes or Customer Service Desk teams, but also their Finance, Facilities and HR teams. The functions listed below are often relevant across any department within any organisation, regardless of the industry or company size.
- Incident Management
- Knowledge Management
- Project Management
- Reporting & Analytics
- Self-Service
- Announcements
- Gamification
- Timecards and Expenses
Each of the functions above play a key role in helping departments/teams achieve their productivity goals such as logging, managing and solving queries, complaints and requests quickly, automatically building a knowledge repository with a search function to find information for future references, logging expense records and managing them efficiently etc. Instead of relying on traditional methods such as spreadsheets or paper records, automating them saves a lot of time for the respective departments which can be reinvested in other tasks or areas within their organisation.
Why ESM?
It is worth mentioning that businesses that are still investing in separate solutions to cater for different business units must start looking into the benefits of having a unified solution that can be used across their entire organisation. Our Business Consultant, David Bullivant lists some good reasons to introduce an ‘Enterprise Service Management’ solution across your organisation:
- Visibility of the value IT brings to the organisation
- Additional ROI on your initial IT investment
- Improvement in the customer experience
- Improved communication and access to information
- Audit and governance control
- Improved efficiencies across the organisation
What’s next?
To summarise, this year’s SDI Conference offered us many insights into changing customer expectations. Although it’s clear that ‘Enterprise Service Management’ reality is here to stay, we wonder what the SDI Conference expert speakers think of the future of ‘Enterprise Service Management’. Any thoughts?