Understanding Enterprise Service Management Systems

Understanding what is an enterprise service management system (ESM) is critical when you are thinking of applying ITSM to your entire business. Although linked, ITSM and ESM are different, and understanding the differences is crucial so you can apply the best practices to your business.

Let’s explore everything on enterprise service management systems, and how to best apply the system to your workplace.

What Is An Enterprise Service Management System (ESM)?

If you’re wondering “What is an Enterprise Service Management System?” you’re in the right place. An Enterprise Service Management is an extension of the principles outlined for IT service management systems. It facilitates enhanced service delivery for teams like legal, marketing, finance, facilities, and human resources. An example of an enterprise management service is when a company creates a service desk to accommodate every team in the organization. This type of service management system uses IT workflows to facilitate better management of service demand as well as delivery via an ESM tool.

How Does ESM Differ From ITSM?

As mentioned previously, an enterprise management system effectively builds on IT service management, which means that the foundation of ESM is ITSM. IT service management involves all of the processes, activities, and policies that an organization uses to deploy, improve, and manage IT service delivery. However, enterprise service management takes the best aspects of ITSM and applies them to the entirety of the organization. The main aspects of ITSM that ESM uses include:

• Service management principles and theories
• Service desks
• Self-service tools like chatbots and knowledge management
• Automation in areas that would benefit from it
• Incident request management software

When ITSM first began, it focused entirely on IT services, which mainly involved providing a service desk help and setting up printers and computers. Because of how important technology has become in the digital age, almost every type of work is tech-enabled, which is why ITSM now covers all services that a company typically offers. These include finance, HR, sales, and software development. The goal of this type of service management system is to lessen the risk, improve operational efficiency, and accommodate strategic planning.

When looking specifically at enterprise management services, this system is designed to bring ITSM strategies to the remainder of the business, which means that the strategies will be applied to other enterprise teams aside from IT. The ITSM goals of accommodating strategic planning, improving operational efficiency, and reducing risk now apply to the entire company. Keep in mind that enterprise management systems typically track:

• Assets
• People
• Parts
• The status of orders, repairs, and other service requests

Is ITIL Important In An ESM?

When you want to incorporate enterprise management service into your business, it’s important to understand that ITIL is oftentimes essential to the effectiveness of ESM. The IT Infrastructure Library is a type of ITSM best practice framework that facilitates the delivery of services while also constantly focusing on improvement.

While there were some limitations to the ITIL 3 framework that caused many companies to shift to other ITSM frameworks, the ITIL 4 framework has remedied most of these issues. For instance, ITIL 4 has four core components that it focuses on, which include information and technology, information streams and processes, organizations and people, and partners and suppliers.

ITIL 3 mainly focused on incident management. On the other hand, ITIL 4 allows for a more comprehensive service management system that can be applied to various non-IT functions. In general, ITIL should be viewed as the foundation of an enterprise management system.

Low Code In ESM

Low-code is a type of software development approach that can be incorporated when you’re configuring your enterprise service management environment. This approach means that very little or no coding is necessary when you’re building processes and applications. Instead of using complex coding languages that would likely require extensive IT knowledge, low-code tools and software use simple visual interfaces with drag-and-drop functionality.

How Can ESM Software Benefit a Workplace?

Companies can derive many benefits from using software pertaining to enterprise management services. However, the benefits that your business experiences from an enterprise management system depend on how well it’s implemented across organizational departments and processes. The following details five of the primary benefits associated with enterprise IT service:

Accountability Of Incidents

A top benefit of using this kind of service management system is that accountability and responsibility can be assigned to all business functions. When an incident arises in one of these business functions, it’s easy to identify why the incident occurred and how to make sure that it doesn’t happen in the future when using enterprise management services.

Visibility In The Workplace

By properly delivering services with ESM, your company can gain better visibility into the workplace and operational performance. The insights that you gain from this enhanced visibility should make it easier to identify potential areas of improvement. Once improvements are made, they can be delivered and managed with enterprise service management in place.

Clarifying Services And Improvements

An ESM system allows your organization to define and clarify resources, activities, and services by the amount of value that they add to your company. The services that don’t add value can then be removed. Once this process has become more streamlined, your company can optimize services on a regular basis for much better operational performance across the board.

Paths Towards Improvement

As touched on previously, improvements across every facet of a business are simpler to make when using an ESM system. Even if it takes some time to implement improvements to operations, having this system in place means that determining the optimal paths towards improvement should be relatively simple and straightforward.

Uses Automation to Drive Efficiency

One of the key advantages of enterprise management systems is that many processes can be automated, which lessens the amount of manual work that needs to be done. Automated tasks can be completed faster than manual ones, which should bolster organizational efficiency and improve revenues.

Service Management Examples

Nearly every business unit can benefit from using a service management system. When rolling out these processes, it’s highly recommended that you identify the business units that will benefit the most from implementing this type of service management system. The following offers a closer look at 4 service management examples:

Managing Requests

There are numerous departments that can benefit from better request management. The automation available in an enterprise management system can effectively manage any requests that are received without requiring much manual input. These requests include customer service inquiries, office supply requests, repair requests, and furniture needs.

Improving Information Flow

Information flow is likely the most critical yet often overlooked aspect of running a successful business. For larger corporations that don’t have an enterprise management service in place, it’s very likely that the flow of information is interrupted constantly, which only serves to delay task completion.

Let’s say that the legal team needs to review and approve a set of documents before a project can continue. Without an automated system in place, the product development team could wait weeks or months to obtain a response after sending the necessary documents. When a business uses an ESM, everything from sending invoices to processing purchase orders is handled by this system, which eliminates any unnecessary delays and makes business operations considerably more efficient.

Tracking and Reporting Outcomes

Whether new employees are going through the onboarding process or a project is ongoing, an ESM system has the functionality needed to track and report outcomes for an array of different projects.

Tailor Portals for Each Department

While an ITSM might only require a single portal since it’s typically used solely by the IT team, enterprise service management systems can be used by nearly every department in the company. To make sure that the system itself isn’t too complex or unwieldy, you can tailor portals for every department. For instance, the HR department could have its own portal with links and several buttons for various HR actions. This portal could provide employees with quick answers, which should lessen the strain placed on HR resources.

How Can SysAid Help with ESM?

Here at SysAid, we offer comprehensive service automation and ESM services that can help your business become more productive and efficient.

Provides a Single Report for All Service Requests

One notable feature of the ESM system we offer is that you will receive a single report for all service requests. There are numerous departments in any business that could benefit from this feature, the primary of which include customer service, human resources, and general administration departments.

Understand the Current Status of All Incidents

Any incidents that are reported to customer service, the IT team, or any other department can be tracked in real-time, which allows you to better understand the current status of all incidents.

Categorize Incidents

When you request our ESM services, we’ll help you categorize incidents, which is essential if you want to resolve the most important incidents in a timely manner. These categories can be specific to the department the incident occurs in.

Access a Knowledge Base

The SysAid Knowledge Management feature is a fully integrated module for providing how-to solutions as well as incident-resolution tips. It’s possible for service desk agents and members of other departments to use and share this knowledge with each other. End users can also be provided with necessary self-help information.

Provide Clear and Accurate Data About Incidents

It’s difficult to resolve an incident or issue that occurs in a business without knowing the pertinent details. An enterprise service management system will be able to capture and provide accurate data about any incident that occurs, which streamlines the resolution process.

Now that you know the answer to “What is ESM?“, you should have all of the information you need to ascertain if this system is the ideal solution for your business. An ESM provides a certain amount of clarity to a company’s internal services that are otherwise unavailable. If your company has used ITSM in the past, now you can understand how  ESM provides all of the same benefits to the entire organization.