Bringing ESM Practices to Other Departments: Unlocking Efficiency and Collaboration

SUMMARY:

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) extends proven IT Service Management (ITSM) concepts and frameworks, such as ITIL, to non-IT service teams across the organization to break down organizational silos, improve cross-departmental collaboration, and drive organizational digital transformation.

• ESM leverages ITSM principles to create holistic strategies that improve service delivery and efficiency by mapping customized processes to relevant parts of departments like HR, marketing, sales, legal, and finance.
• Human Resources (HR) can streamline critical functions, such as new employee onboarding, by integrating systems like Workday HRIS with tools such as Jira Service Management to automatically trigger requests for laptop provisioning and account setup.
• Marketing and Sales teams optimize workflows and enhance turnaround times by utilizing service desk software for campaign tracking, collaborative editing, and strengthening back-office processes, enabling them to “do more with less”.
• Legal and Finance departments adopt ESM practices to standardize communication, enhance visibility, manage compliance (like GDPR), and improve accountability through efficient tracking, documentation, and the creation of centralized knowledge resources.

By embracing ESM principles and leveraging ITSM tools, organizations gain a competitive edge by automating processes, streamlining governance, and empowering teams to deliver greater value at an increased velocity.

IT Service Management (ITSM) goes beyond basic IT support and holds a strategic role. Its fundamental idea is to deliver IT as a service and ensure IT teams handle end-to-end delivery to customers. ITSM encompasses various workplace technologies and tech-based processes found in every department of modern businesses. It should provide support to any team that relies on technology, which is practically all teams in today’s business landscape.

Considering the prevalence of technology across organizational departments, ITSM tools can be adapted to meet the unique needs and workflows of different teams. ITSM principles and frameworks, such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), can help other departments adopt ITSM best practices, fostering the development of holistic, efficient Enterprise Service Management (ESM) strategies.

ESM vs. ITSM

IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) are related but distinct concepts. ITSM primarily focuses on IT-related services within an organization, while ESM extends these practices to a broader range of service teams across the organization. ESM incorporates business-centric use cases, manages service demand and supply through a unified platform, portal, and service catalog, and leverages PaaS/low-code development tooling to enhance innovation and workflow automation.

While ITSM focuses on IT service issues, ESM applies ITSM service management concepts to other departments to improve service delivery and efficiency. However, it is not a matter of ITSM versus ESM but rather a combination of both. ESM inherits the benefits of ITSM and applies them to other business use cases.

Implementing an effective ESM strategy enables businesses to build upon successful ITSM implementations and apply those learnings across different teams. By incorporating proven ITSM processes where relevant, ESM enhances internal processes, promotes collaboration across teams and functions, and facilitates effective, efficient service delivery. This approach reduces silos and generates greater value for the organization.

The objective is to transition from ITSM to ESM by leveraging successful practices and mapping customized ITSM-based processes to relevant parts of departments or teams.

Breaking Down Silos with ESM

By applying Enterprise Service Management (ESM) practices and tools inspired by ITIL or similar frameworks, organizations can streamline processes and provide faster, more accessible support to employees across teams. Departments like HR, marketing, sales, legal, and finance report improved connectivity, visibility, and turnaround times. 

In HR, for example, ITSM tools and principles better connect initially disjointed tools, allowing teams to hire new talent faster. Mingling ITSM with marketing enhances visibility and approval turnaround times, enabling new products to reach the market more quickly.

In sales, where team members face increasingly demanding customer expectations, an ESM-imbued approach lets them “do more with less” by shortening sales cycles and strengthening back-office processes. 

And even in historically less agile departments, like legal and finance, ITSM tools and principles enable organizations to evolve and stay modern.  Ultimately, effective integration of ESM with other departments enables organizations to remain competitive in today’s dynamic business landscape. 

Atlassian, which makes team collaboration software like Jira, Confluence, and Trello, is an excellent example of a company that applies ESM internally across its business teams.

Leveraging ESM in HR to Streamline Onboarding

Implementing an Enterprise Service Management (ESM) solution in the Human Resources (HR) department offers significant advantages. HR teams handle crucial business requests that require prompt processing to ensure smooth operations. By using a service desk software that promotes collaboration with IT, the partnership between HR and IT is strengthened. Atlassian’s choice of Workday as its human resource information system (HRIS) served as a foundation for its onboarding process.

Workday HRIS provided initial data for new employees, which was integrated with Jira Service Management through a third-party integration layer. This integration allowed Jira to automatically trigger relevant requests such as laptop provisioning, account setup, and orientation scheduling.

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

Optimizing Marketing Processes with ESM

The Marketing team can significantly benefit from leveraging ITSM tools and concepts. By utilizing service desk software, marketing processes can be optimized to achieve business goals effectively, improve collaboration, and attain a hassle-free workflow. Let’s get into an example of how Atlassian uses it.

Atlassian’s Product Marketing team leverages Jira Service Management to handle marketing campaigns. This platform allows easy assignment of tasks to cross-functional teams while tracking high-level project milestones. By centralizing various team members from different departments, the team achieves better collaboration. Additionally, the team implements change management principles to overcome bottlenecks:

• Develop content plans and templates with clear objectives and target audiences in mind.
• Establish high-visibility pages with formal approval workflows involving core stakeholders.
• Streamline minor updates without additional approval steps.
• Utilize a “proofing” channel in Slack for collaborative editing, reducing lengthy review processes.

By employing these ITSM tools and ESM processes, Atlassian’s Product Marketing team achieves faster publication timelines, maintains campaign clarity, and minimizes delays through efficient cross-functional collaboration.

Legal Workflows and ESM: Streamlining Communication and Improving Efficiency

In legal departments, efficient organization and effective task execution are crucial for managing critical work and reducing legal risks. To meet these demands, legal teams can leverage ESM principles to streamline communication and enhance efficiency.

In this example, Atlassian’s legal department successfully implemented ESM practices, particularly in addressing concerns related to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance during the pandemic. The Privacy team transitioned from handling COVID-19 and GDPR queries ad hoc to a more structured approach that improved tracking and knowledge management.

By using Jira Service Management chat to answer questions directly in Slack and track requests, the team achieved a more organized, accessible system. Automation features in Jira, such as scheduling and work delegation, allowed them to address recurring concerns efficiently. Additionally, topic-based tagging enabled automatic categorization, further enhancing workflow management.

Jira’s reporting capabilities enabled the team to identify patterns in raised concerns, facilitating the creation of a central playbook as a reliable source of information. This playbook proved valuable in managing surges in requests when new laws like GDPR came into effect. The outcomes were an improved customer experience, time savings for the legal team, and increased confidence in sharing knowledge with employees when needed.

By leveraging ESM tools and practices, legal departments can enhance workflows, increase efficiency, and ensure effective communication, ultimately mitigating legal risks and providing a better experience for all stakeholders.

Optimizing Finance Operations with ESM: Streamlining Processes and Enhancing Visibility

In departments like Finance that follow stringent procedures and require thorough documentation, leveraging ITSM tools and principles can deliver significant benefits. Jira Service Management provides a solution for standardizing communications, reducing silos, increasing visibility, and connecting processes across the organization. By adopting a centralized information hub, finance teams can track accurate, up-to-date data, enabling decision-makers to make informed choices. Furthermore, the availability of task and request histories provides a clear, traceable paper trail, promoting accountability, facilitating audits, and supporting process reviews.

Finance departments can draw inspiration from ITIL V3’s Financial Management, a framework that offers standardized processes for budgeting, accounting, and charging requirements in IT service provision. These processes include financial management support, financial planning, financial analysis and reporting, and service invoicing. Additionally, ITIL Financial Management provides recommended key performance indicators (KPIs) and checklists that can be tailored to the finance department’s specific needs.

By embracing ESM practices and utilizing ITSM tools, finance departments can streamline their operations, enhance visibility, and improve accountability. This leads to more efficient financial management, greater reporting accuracy, and a stronger foundation for decision-making and regulatory compliance.

Transitioning from ITSM to ESM

By incorporating ITSM processes, concepts, and tools, organizations can make a smooth transition to an ESM-centric model that fuels their digital transformation journey. ESM brings critical benefits that contribute to this transformation:

• Clarifying services and driving improvements: ESM enables teams to articulate their services effectively with consistent, unified tools. This enhances visibility into processes and fosters collaboration among different departments, leading to improved service offerings.
• Breaking down organizational silos: Interdepartmental collaboration often slows when work moves between teams. ESM provides a well-orchestrated flow of work, minimizing delays and communication bottlenecks during cross-functional processes.
• Driving efficiency through automation: Automation plays a significant role in modern ESM, ranging from simple to complex tasks. By automating work processes, organizations can reduce manual errors, enhance service delivery speed, boost productivity, and increase overall capacity without requiring additional team members.
• Streamlining control and governance: ESM embraces methods and systems that enable effective tracking, measurement, centralization, and operational streamlining. This results in more efficient management and administration, improved cost-effectiveness, increased compliance, and reduced risk for organizations.

By embracing ESM principles and leveraging ITSM tools, organizations can unlock the potential for digital transformation. This approach empowers teams to work collaboratively, automate processes, and streamline control and governance, ultimately driving efficiency and enabling successful digital initiatives — these aren’t just buzzwords used as goalposts anymore. ITSM is fundamental to your teams delivering more value at a greater velocity.  As this article explains, with proper implementation of ITSM across departments, great results are possible!

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