The Leading Provider of Service Management Solutions
Enterprise Service Management
(Beyond ITSM)
Building a service-oriented enterprise
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
Executive Summary
Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is the application of service
management models, tools and practices to other non-IT service domains
within the business – with the objective of achieving higher productivity in
those areas. By applying support methodologies you can help the rest of
the business gain control over the flow and execution of internal processes,
streamline internal service delivery and divert more resources to strategic
improvement and transformation projects that will drive the business
forward.
The role of the CIO is to drive the use of technology that increases
business productivity and efficiency. In a recent survey of business
stakeholders, nearly 30% of respondents stated that the CIO was the most
important business leader in driving business transformation – higher than
any other senior executive (including the CEO). The Deloitte CIO survey
highlighted that 82% of CIOs are focused on enabling new business
requirements. Where business applications drive transformation through
the automation of core business processes, ESM drives productivity by
improving the flow and execution of back-office work that supports core
business. Founded on service management principles that have grown
organically within IT, ESM represents best practice techniques and
technology to make a real mark on the business.
Contents
2
3
Introduction
4
Service domains - The common denominators
5
What is Enterprise Service Management?
6
The opportunity for IT
7
The end user perspective
8
The service domain perspective
9
The C-level perspective
10
Making it work: The adoption journey
12
Benefits of Enterprise Service Management
13
Moving from strategy to ESM adoption
14
Conclusions
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
Introduction
The activities that happen across
large organizations are complex and
diverse. Core business processes
deliver outcomes directly to customers.
Internal business infrastructure
and operations support these core
processes. HR, Facilities Management,
Procurement, Administration and
Legal are all part of the value network
“jigsaw”, even though they don’t play a
direct part in the supply chain.
Every day, your staff need help from
colleagues in other departments to get
their jobs done. They all have a part
to play in the value network and they
often need support from elsewhere
in the business to progress tasks.
Running a business is all about helping
your people to work together to get the
job done – to create business value
as quickly, efficiently and effectively as
possible. When you look at the whole
phenomenon at an organizational
level, it is a vast network of complex
workflows. This is the pulse of the
organization.
Some of this flow relates to your core
business processes, controlled by
enterprise software tools like SAP.
These core processes are the things
you absolutely have to do well to thrive
as a company. But that isn’t the full
picture. Every day there are many
hundreds (or thousands) of internal
transactions that happen between
business functions and individuals
at a more granular level: asking for
help, requesting information, or letting
another team know there has been a
quality problem.
3
This is where Enterprise Service
Management (ESM) comes in. ESM
formalizes and streamlines the mass
of business-facing interactions that
usually fall below the radar of the Chief
Operating Officer (COO).
Your staff are consumers of a set of
multiple internal enterprise services.
The services they individually
“consume” will differ between
individuals in the end user community
depending on the objectives of their
specific role, but many are common
across the company (e.g. HR, facilities
and finance).
At a high level, the people in your
organization all want the same thing:
•
To get support and information
from other departments easily.
•
To know when that support or
information will arrive.
•
To be able to escalate requests to
ensure they can meet their own
deadlines.
•
To be able to manage and execute
requests from other areas of the
business efficiently and effectively
so that they’re not tied up all day
with “other people’s work”.
Managers and executives require:
•
Accurate real-time reporting
providing transparency across the
business.
•
Information to enable strategic
focus to prioritize change and
leverage resources.
•
A system of management to create
efficiency across the business.
•
Ability to develop and implement
innovation and new initiatives.
So how can you facilitate this for people
across your organization? Clearly, any
such strategic transformation needs
to be considered at enterprise-level.
Enterprise Service Management is a
company-wide strategy for streamlining
internal business processes. When
every department in your company
participates in the construction of an
ESM portal it creates reciprocal value.
Having a single portal for interaction
with other departments can significantly
reduce wastage and drive up business
productivity.
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
Service Domains - The Common Denominators
A service domain is any
business department,
team, or unit that provides
internal services to other
areas of the business.
Typically, when talking
about service domains,
most people will think of
HR, Facilities Management,
Administration and
Procurement, but to some
degree every department
is a service provider for the
rest of the organization.
Often, service domains don’t think of
themselves as such, e.g. Marketing
don’t think of themselves as a service
provider for Sales. Most business
functions are not service-oriented
and dislike the idea of being a service
provider for other departments.
Nevertheless, each department both
provides and consumes services from
elsewhere in the business. That means
they all have something in common.
4
Many of the operational needs of a
service domain are the same:
•
Better workload management –
Routine service requests need
to be better managed in order to
break out of firefighting mode and
divert more time and attention to
strategic change projects.
•
Reduced costs – Budgets are
being squeezed. Leadership
demands to “Do more with less”
are heard everywhere in the
business and service domains
need to streamline execution of
business processes to reduce
costs.
•
Faster output – The ability to
service inbound requests more
quickly to deliver the outcomes that
other business functions need in
a timely manner (with an eye on
business priorities, not just who
shouts loudest).
•
Better governance – Control
over policies and processes to
enable management visibility and
intervention.
So how do we meet these needs?
•
Better demand/request
management – Digital tools to
manage inbound demand more
efficiently. Get your people off the
phones and into “execution mode”
– actually sorting out problems and
delivering value instead of getting
tied up logging an ever-increasing
list of issues.
•
Better queue management –
Managing the recording and
prioritization of inbound requests
so that activity can be better
aligned with business demand.
•
Better process/workflow
management – Supporting
consistent quality of output by
implementing clear processes
which are known to deliver the
required result for the service
customer - within feasible time and
cost constraints.
•
Better operational visibility &
control – Nothing works perfectly
first time round, so in order to get
performance up to an optimized
level, you need to measure
performance and report on the
underlying metrics so you can
pinpoint where improvements need
to be made.
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
What is Enterprise Service Management?
Enterprise Service
Management is about
applying a service-oriented
business model to the way
your organization works
internally.
It is an operational architecture where
each functional area of the business
is defined as a service domain that
offers services. These services deliver
outcomes for other business functions
and help to support them in their
ability to deliver results for external
customers. Thus, the productivity and
profitability of the company will be
improved by improving the efficiency of
internal operations.
As John Seddon of Vanguard (an
advocate of the application of systems
thinking to service domains) says, “cost
is in flow; value is in activity”, i.e. costs
are incurred through poor flow of work
between organizational functions.
5
The fundamental idea of ESM is to:
•
Reduce the overheads commonly
associated with department-todepartment interaction.
•
Increase predictability in terms of
both the quality and timescale of
output (e.g. ensuring the desired
outcome is delivered right and
delivered fast).
•
Increase process efficiency within
service domains to keep the cost
of execution as low as possible
without compromising the quality
or delivery timescale.
Efficiency levels vary across
departments, so there are usually
at least one or two weak links in the
chain that create bottlenecks. Every
organization has its own “black hole”
department that has a reputation
for slow responses. ESM is a model
by which you can transform your
organization from a clunky collection of
departments into a well-oiled machine.
By integrating departments more
effectively around the many touch
points that business processes flow
across, you can facilitate better,
faster and cheaper operations – and
better alignment between what one
department needs and another delivers.
So what does ESM look like? There
are three perspectives that must be
considered:
•
The end user perspective –
Delivering an easy-to-use
enterprise services portal that puts
all business-facing services in one
accessible location.
•
The service domain perspective
– Creating a catalog of businessfacing services, supported by
automated service execution
processes.
•
The C - level perspective –
Facilitating the construction of
the enterprise service portal and
working closely with business
functions to define and automate
their service execution processes.
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
The opportunity for IT
The IT department is
a center for service
management excellence
within the business. IT is
the most complex service
domain, responsible for
tens (or hundreds) of
thousands of assets and
how they interact to create
services and business
value.
Effective IT operations are founded
on solid processes and process
automation, so the IT department
knows a lot about managing activity
to deliver value. In more mature IT
organizations, service management is
a proven methodology for delivering
value to the business, based on:
•
Service-oriented strategy,
design, transition, operations and
improvement.
•
Effective demand management
using the latest technologies.
•
Process-driven activity
management.
•
Deep understanding of complex
value networks.
•
Balancing cost and value.
•
Efficient, business prioritized
support structures that solve
problems when things go wrong.
6
The opportunity for IT is to leverage
this knowledge and experience in
other areas of the business. But it’s
not as simple as mapping what IT
does directly over other departments.
Each service domain has its own way
of doing things. They have their own
internal customer demands, services
and execution processes. They have
their own people, culture, language and
attitudes.
Success in ESM requires a shift
in perspective within IT: from the
traditional “inside-out” silo mentality
(where IT has something of a “themand-us” attitude) to a more holistic
business perspective that takes into
account the specific challenges and
needs of each service domain.
When we examine the common
challenges that service domains
face, the scope of Enterprise Service
Management emerges and the full
extent of the opportunity which IT now
has (to deliver transformational value
to the business) becomes clear. The
task is to apply specially-tailored best
practices to other service domains, and
tie it all together with an enterprise-wide
service portal.
IT already has many of the tools
(people, processes, technology) that
business functions need to make their
operations work more efficiently and
effectively. The primary challenge lies in
adapting what IT does to fit an array of
different departments.
It is undeniable that technology is a key
driver for businesses today. The use of
technology transcends departmental,
geographical and hierarchic
boundaries. Enterprise technology,
once the domain of people in lab coats,
now lives out in the business.
There isn’t a single corner of a
modern enterprise organization where
technology hasn’t been put in place
to automate and streamline at least
some of the core work being done. But
although many tasks themselves are
automated, the processes that thread
these tasks together to create value
are often handled manually – which
means requests often get lost, dropped,
or executed in first-come-first-served
order that doesn’t mesh well with actual
business priorities.
ESM is an opportunity for IT to apply
effective service management and
process automation across the
business to move the tide-mark of
technology up once more - from the
level of task automation to business
process automation.
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
The End User Perspective
To understand one of the
main benefits of Enterprise
Service Management it is
important to understand
one key concept: the
end user community
of IT is also the end
user community for HR,
Facilities Management,
Administration, Finance
and any other internal
service provider.
Everybody in your organization is part
of this collective end user community.
These are the customers of ESM.
The common need, running across
all end users in all business functions
is this: They want easy access to the
services, tools and information they
need to do their jobs better. They may
consume different services, depending
on their role, but there is a clear need
to make the access and consumption
of business-facing services as easy as
possible.
7
Customer-facing business functions
have a number of different interfaces
with the outside world (ecommerce
websites, mobile apps, email, the
call center, supplier portals, etc.) - all
designed for optimized interaction with
customers and other third parties.
But how do business-facing functions
interact with each other? There is no
standard interface for internal business
functions to work together. External
customers get a glossy “store front”,
but where is the glossy store front
for customers that are internal to the
business? Many organizations have
people dedicated to improving the
business customer experience, but
there are few people thinking about the
internal end user experience.
For the end user, Enterprise Service
Management is about having a onestop shop for all of the enterprise
services they need to do their jobs as
efficiently and effectively as possible.
With an ESM portal, each individual
employee has complete visibility of
the internal support services and
information sources that are available
to assist them.
Large organizations often have multiple
internal call-centers or hot-lines. They
are fighting the same war on many
fronts.
In the ESM architecture, a digital
enterprise services portal is
complemented by a manned enterprise
service desk. This shared service desk
is a single point of contact representing
all of the internal service domains,
covering the full catalog of enterprise
services, and capable of handling or
routing issues.
For the end user community this is the
ultimate in simplicity and consistency.
One portal with one interface and one
set of login details, accessible via the
web and mobile, complemented by one
shared service desk with one phone
number for when they really need to
speak to a human being.
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
The Service Domain Perspective
A service domain is any
business department
or team that provides
internal services to other
departments, teams, or
individuals within the same
business.
So what does ESM look like from the
perspective of a business function
which provides internal services?
For each service domain, Enterprise
Service Management comes in two
parts:
8
1. Managing demand more efficiently
by presenting a catalog of services
to the business - and a means to
request and track them.
This takes a significant
administrative strain off the
department by pushing phone
traffic to the web ESM portal.
Now the people in the department
can focus on executing requests
instead of logging them.
However, it must be remembered
that an enterprise service portal
does not exist purely for the
convenience of the service
provider. It must work well for the
end user as well. Accessibility
and usability are critical. People
seek the line of least resistance,
so if your ESM portal is clunky
and difficult to use, people will still
pick up the phone or send you an
email.
2. Streamlining service delivery
by establishing clear execution
processes and automating the flow
Although solid process
management is already embedded
in the ethos of IT operations,
many other business functions
still operate on a haphazard
basis. They are neither service
nor process oriented. Requests
coming from other areas of the
business come in via telephone or
email and the quality of response
is largely reliant on the individual
that receives the request.
Often, these requests will fall into
a “black hole” and the requester
will spend time chasing them.
From the end user perspective,
the service is not good. In order
to improve quality of services
provided, the first step is to define
services, outcomes and supporting
processes. After this, processes
can be modelled, automated and
“hooked” up to the service catalog
to connect the two parts – the
request and the execution.
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
The C-Level Perspective
In the last few years, the
desire to leverage service
management principles
and practices has spread
outwards from IT to
encompass other service
domains in the business.
When buying IT Service Management
solutions, many customers are now
looking to extend the value they gain
from the technology by developing
service management capabilities
“outside IT”; most commonly in backoffice functions like HR, Facilities
Management, Administration and
Finance.
As the value of service management
principles and practices is now been
proven in these areas, there is a
growing desire to achieve greater
efficiencies and greater economies
of scale by applying a more strategic,
enterprise-wide approach to service
management.
ESM is about taking the expertise,
practices and tools that IT has and
applying them to other service domains
to create a broader architecture
for service management across
the organization (e.g. IT Service
Management, without the “IT”).
Like many other enterprise-wide
strategies, technology is a key enabler.
Service management software tools
are now mature and flexible enough
to make the Enterprise Service
Management model practical and
achievable.
9
What does the technology
look like?
•
•
•
A digital portal that enables easy
access to all business-facing
services provided by all service
domains. This is the interface.
A process management engine
to drive process automation, SLA
management and escalation
structures. This is the guts of
the technology, responsible
for managing/automating the
execution of inbound service
requests.
Performance monitoring and
reporting to drive continual
improvement. Nothing is ever
right the first time. Each service
domain needs the ability to
monitor performance with a view
to driving continual improvement,
supported by the expertise of the
IT department.
Effectively, an Enterprise Service
Management portal is a service which
IT can deliver for the business, with the
support of each of the individual service
domains.
Integration
It is wrong to say that all business
departments are “green-field sites”
when it comes to efficient process
management.
Some internal business processes will
already be supported by existing tools.
Where this is the case, the under-thehood workings of the internal service
are already in place, and the task for IT
is simply to integrate the management
of requests into the Enterprise Service
Management portal.
This will require some technical
integration to connect the ESM portal
(the front end) and the software that
currently handles the execution of the
process (the back end).
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
Making it Work: The Adoption Journey
We have been at the
forefront of Enterprise
Service Management
since its evolution out of
the traditional IT Service
Management sphere.
With organizations operating multiple
legacy systems in the majority of
functional areas, the big bang approach
for ESM is in the minority. From our
experience of delivering ESM in large
organizations and the international best
practice research which we conduct,
there are two mainstream approaches
for the ESM adoption journey:
•
Sequential – Working across the
company to implement ESM,
department by department.
•
Prioritized – Selecting a small
bundle of key services from across
a number of different departments
to tackle ESM in order of business
priority. This gives the end user
community the highest possible
value “version 1.0” that can be built
upon over time.
A staged approach is recommended as
more realistic and likely to succeed, but
it is still a long journey. Like many other
strategic technology-driven change
projects, you only really get one shot
at making it work. If it fails, a second
shot will meet with much increased
resistance.
10
As every organization has a different
structure of departments, there is
no off-the-shelf roadmap for which
departments and services should be
tackled first, but experienced guidance
is a must.
If you plan to implement ESM
sequentially, the first department you
select will become a template for
further roll-outs; useful evidence of the
value of service management “beyond
IT” that will help you to sell the value to
the next department in the roadmap.
Bear in mind that the relationship with
each business function does not end
with the inclusion of their services in the
ESM portal. There will be an ongoing
need to help them optimize their
service portfolio over time, so the IT
department cannot simply “cut and run”
after the initial implementation.
A prioritized approach that picks out
key services from across the full
spectrum of internal services will deliver
more value to the end user community
more quickly, but you will have to deal
with a larger number of departments
and stakeholder simultaneously.
The success of ESM is largely reliant
on the expertise and attention of your IT
staff, so your adoption strategy should
take the bandwidth of your IT people
into account. The most obvious starting
points are the departments that are
almost entirely ‘back office’ functions
(and therefore have the largest portfolio
of internal business services) – HR,
Facilities Management, Administration,
Procurement, Finance and Legal. As
such, this is where the greatest value is
to be gained from an ESM program.
Departments such as Sales, Marketing
and Customer Service are more
customer-facing, have fewer businessfacing services, so these should be
brought into the ESM program later in
the process. It is essential to draw up
a high-level roadmap that shows the
order in which you will build up your
ESM program.
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
Making it Work: The Adoption Journey (Continued)
General implementation
process
Identify the service domains in your
business – the distinct departments
in your organization which provide
internal services to other departments.
This list is the starting point for
building a roadmap. From here, you
should engage with business function
stakeholders to identify the “standard”
services they offer internally to the
business. IT needs to develop an
understanding of what the business
function does, for which internal
customers, and how they do it. IT
also needs to use domain-specific
terminology, i.e. speak the language
of the business department you are
engaging with. Terms like ESM, service
catalog, ITIL and ITSM will be unknown
to them, and technical terminology and
abbreviations are a turn-off for all but a
few outside of IT. Sometimes there are
direct conflicts between IT terminology
and terminology in other domains
that IT people must be aware of. For
example, IT uses the word incident to
describe a break in a service, whereas
HR people will think of an incident as a
physical accident.
11
1. Sell the benefits of having an
overall enterprise-wide system,
but also sell the specific benefits
to each business function. Create
evidence with a proof of concept.
2. Compare and contrast what the
service domain does with what IT
does. What is the same? What is
different? Find the common ground
but also what is unique about the
particular department.
3. Identify the demands that other
departments make of them. These
are often difficult to define as many
business functions are not serviceoriented and have an ad-hoc
approach to external demands.
4. Draw up a list of business-facing
services and agree which should
be added to the enterprise service
portal. If necessary, lay these out
in phases for staged inclusion in
the enterprise service catalog.
5. Model the processes by which
these services are executed,
adding in SLAs and escalation
structures to ensure smooth
operation in a way that meets the
expectations of internal customers.
6. Add these services to a test
area in your Enterprise Service
Management portal.
7. Test with a selected group of
stakeholders taken from the end
user community. Make refinements
until it is accepted by the test
group.
8. Move the test version into the live
environment, making it accessible
to the wider end user community
by publication in the enterprise
service portal.
9. Help the service domain to adapt
the interface and supporting
processes, establish reporting, and
institute continual improvement
by listening to internal service
customers.
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
Benefits of Enterprise Service Management
Achieve operational visibility
ESM lets you see the value that each department adds to the business. When you
define what a department is to the rest of the business you are also defining the
edges. You can see where one department ends and another begins. Once you
know where the boundaries are, you can make them more fluid and responsive to
changing patterns of demand. Essentially, ESM gives you a map of where value
is created in your organization – and the processes that support it, allowing you to
find and eliminate bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Support better governance
When you have better visibility of operations, it’s easier to govern what
departments are doing to ensure they are in line with overarching strategic
objectives (e.g. are they providing the right set of services?).
Institute functional
excellence
ESM streamlines the process of managing and executing internal business service
requests, creating greater efficacy and efficiency across all service domains –
achieving higher quality of output at a lower cost.
Support value transformation
By streamlining the execution of internal business services, departments can
reduce their day-to-day operational overheads and devote more time and
resources to change and improvement projects that enhance value creation. The
companies that will succeed in the next decade are those that realize that they
must break out of “firefighting mode” and become more pro-active and agile.
Manage interaction
By bringing the interactions that happen between departments into a system or
record, these interactions can be measured, managed and optimized. Deployment
of a digital interface reduces operational overheads by reducing inbound phone
calls and emails – with requests being automatically routed to the right teams.
ESM is a good strategy for reducing “inbox overload” and weaning staff away from
using the email system as a work queue.
Reduce technology costs
Enterprise-wide technology programs are an opportunity to take advantage of
economies of scale. The implementation of a single enterprise-wide digital portal
and back-end process management, supported by one software solution, ensures
that the cost of the supporting technology is minimized (versus having a number of
different ‘point’ solutions catering for each domain).
Break down silos
ESM is, by nature, an antidote to the siloed nature of many large organizations.
It embodies a more transparent, integrated and cooperative mentality where
business functions think more deeply about how they work with other departments
to increase business productivity. By turning barriers into interfaces, the walls
between business functions become windows, and departments become more
tuned-in to the wider business ecosystem.
Ensure internal business
alignment
By providing clarity on which internal services business functions provide for each
other, it is easier to align services provided with demand from other departments.
Increase end user
satisfaction and productivity
The availability of a one-stop-shop for all internal services and information sources
means faster access to the tools that your people need to be the most productive.
12
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
Moving from strategy to ESM adoption
Transformation projects are
challenging
A recent report from Forbes Insights/
KPMG indicates that 93% of
businesses are currently planning/
delivering a business transformation
project, but more than half of
transformation projects fail to achieve
the stated objectives. As with any
large-scale organizational change, the
pitfalls are many. Primarily, an ESM
implementation is one of engagement
first and technology second, but the
sheer number of stakeholders that
must be involved can make it difficult
to gain consensus to the plan and
the timeline. It is critical for IT to get
under the skin of each service domain
before embarking on any technology
build work. When run as a technology
project, ESM won’t deliver the right
technology. It starts with people first,
then processes, then tools.
ESM is for large
organizations
Enterprise Service Management is
for enterprise-scale organizations
with large numbers of staff spread out
across departments and geographies.
If you’re a small or medium size
organization, the chances are that ESM
will be a “sledgehammer to crack a nut”
and will not be a priority.
Service maturity issues
The desire to improve is a prerequisite.
Service management will create both
standardization and serve as a catalyst
for improvement. The adoption journey
will create the proof points to the
benefits of the transformation process
and will require multiple champions
across business functions. The ultimate
goal is to rollout these benefits across
the business. For organizations not
committed to improve, ESM may be a
step too far until the basics of service
management are adopted.
13
Executive buy-in
End user adoption is critical
When IT is pitching the concept of a
digital portal and process automation
to a service domain, the business
function managers may begin to think
about seeking alternative solutions,
e.g. buying their own distinct portal and
process engine. But this would have
a negative effect on the total cost, the
consistency of end user experience,
integration, and the ability to monitor
and manage operations across all
service domains. So, it is critical to get
executive buy-in to support the idea
of ESM as a strategic company-wide
technology platform.
Like any other technology, usability is
the key to adoption and adoption is the
key to success. Levels of computer
literacy will vary greatly across the
organization, so ease of use is critical
to adoption. Effectively, a digital portal
must cater for the “lowest common
denominator” of technical ability.
Familiarity is the better part of usability,
so making use of common consumer
ecommerce features (like a web
shopping cart), with which most people
will already be familiar, will improve
intuitiveness of the system.
Business relationship
management
Making ESM work requires strong
communication between IT and all
of the other business functions, so
relationship management is critical
to success. Traditionally, this is not
something that IT is good at, so it is
important to find (or hire) people who
can liaise effectively with business
functions. The relationship doesn’t end
when the technology is launched to
the end user community. ESM is not a
“fire and forget” technology project. IT
needs to maintain relationships with the
business community in order to support
continual improvement and increasing
value over time. Effectively, relationship
management between IT and “outside
IT” service domains will become an
ongoing burden for IT.
Data security issues
Business departments such as HR
and Finance are very sensitive about
their data and reluctant to let other
departments (such as IT) get too close.
Instead, it may be necessary for IT to
train people in these departments to
work with their own data. IT should
be aware of any such requirements in
advance of the implementation so that
they can be factored into the project
timeline.
Enterprise Service Management (Beyond ITSM): Building a service-oriented enterprise
Conclusions
While customer-facing
business services are
scrutinized and optimized
by the COO, internal
business-facing services
often operate below the
radar.
As a result these “non-strategic”
processes are often undermanaged
and underfunded – yet they represent
a significant chunk of the work being
done by your staff.
In many departments, internal support
activities (servicing the needs of other
departments) take up too much of
the working day - to the detriment of
strategic change and improvement
projects that drive the business forward.
14
The application of service management
practices (commonly used within IT) to
other business functions is a route out
of this operational rut – using tried-andtested best practice frameworks like
Information Technology Infrastructure
Library (ITIL®) to streamline day-to-day
operations and release more resources
for improvement.
Enterprise Service Management
represents a clear strategic vision for
how IT can add measurable value
across the whole of the business.
By building a more efficient internal
business model, ESM delivers in three
key areas: cost reduction, increased
efficiency and quality, and higher end
user satisfaction – translating into
improved support for the core business
processes that generate revenue.
The application of what IT knows to
other areas of the business will drive
a step-up in productivity across the
board.
Fundamentally, ESM enables a shift
in focus from reactive firefighting to
proactive strategic development, by
minimizing the time and effort spent
serving day-to-day “utility” functions. As
a result, all service domains within the
business can optimize the value they
deliver.
Enterprise Service Management is an
opportunity for IT to lift up all of the
service domains across the business –
with a knock-on effect on cost, agility,
productivity and profitability.
Axios
For more than 25 years, Axios
Systems has been committed
to innovation by providing
rapid deployment of Service
Management software. With
an exclusive focus on Service
Management, Axios is recognised
as a worldleader, by the leading
analysts and their global client
base.
Axios’s enterprise software,
assyst, is purpose-built, designed
to transform IT departments from
technology-focused cost centers
into profitable business-focused
customer service teams. assyst
adds tangible value to each client’s
organization by building on the
ITIL® framework to help solve their
business challenges.
Axios is headquartered in the UK,
with offices across Europe, the
Americas, Middle East and Asia
Pacific. For more information about
Axios Systems, please visit us:
www.axiossystems.com
@Axios_Systems
/axiossystems
About the Author
Dr. Nigel Martin
VP of Global Marketing
Nigel Martin has more than 20
years of experience in global
enterprise software. Nigel has
written multiple research papers
on organizational strategy and
holds a doctorate in strategy and
organizational brand development.
Nigel can be contacted at nigel.martin@axiossystems.com