Contemporary customer experiences are spilling over into companies
In the digital life of the modern world, we have immediate and instant access to tools, knowledge and services. The Internet is available virtually anywhere, everyone carries their device with them at all times, and fulfilling a new requirement or need is usually just a matter of a few clicks.
More and more people expect similar experiences to those they have as customers in their role as employees in companies: things that are necessary for work must be delivered quickly and available by the organization in low-friction processes.
The classic paperwork, lengthy processes, frustrating running behind – that no longer fits into the new world of work, in which capable, motivated people can choose their jobs and in which companies are more dependent than ever on employees having the space and freedom to really develop their talents instead of constantly having to deal with “passport A38” and wasting a lot of time pointlessly.
Organizations have to reposition themselves
Modern companies have long since recognized this changing situation, drawn conclusions from it and taken the shift in requirements and expectations into account. Here the administrative teams have once again led the way by putting their work and tasks in a new context.
Over the last two decades, this has given rise to a concept that is now known as IT service management (ITSM). In the ITSM approach, a company’s administrative teams see themselves as service providers for employees. These are considered the (internal) customers.
The ITSM teams systematically break down their work areas and tasks into individual services. You define and develop services, provide them, support them throughout their entire life cycle and continuously optimize them.
Internal customer and service orientation
What every organization strives for externally is also the focus in the administrative area: the change to a modern customer and service orientation. The IT teams rely on specific (standardized) processes, solutions and tools that promote the efficient end-to-end provision of IT services while effectively supporting the organization’s business processes.
The backbone of the ITSM concept is formed by methods, concepts and solutions such as service level agreements, professional incident and problem management, digital service desks, automation and scalable technologies. The goals and intentions behind this approach are obvious: It’s about more efficient processes, more automation, better control, transparent workflows and faster, less frictionless service delivery to customers while at the same time relieving the burden on IT with regard to standard tasks.
But the ITSM approach does not (only) follow pure charity: IT naturally knows that it is a crucial wheel in the organization’s wheels. If there is a problem with the IT services, everything quickly comes to a standstill. Therefore, the modernization and streamlining sought through ITSM serves the entire company.
Scaling and Enterprise Service Management
With many new, successful trends in companies, sooner or later efforts arise to scale the innovative working methods and expand them to other organizational areas. The most prominent example is agile development methods such as Scrum, which are intended to be scaled beyond the teams to the entire organization using different frameworks (e.g. SAFe, LeSS or Spotify).
Such efforts can now also be observed in IT service management. The magic word in this context is Enterprise Service Management (ESM). If functioning IT service management is established and develops its potential for the organization, employees expect similar customer experiences when interacting with other organizational units, such as human resources, marketing, sales, and procurement.
ESM stipulates that these (and other) departments, teams or areas also adopt the service idea and cast their internal tasks and services in the form of standardized services. So it’s about better standardizing all internal services across the entire company, creating controllable and visible workflows for them, delivering them efficiently to employees and constantly improving them.
ESM: Powerful potentials of a complex transformation
Here too, a comparison with Agile scaling is obvious. Individual teams can adapt agile methods relatively quickly, but when scaling, things become significantly more complex. This is also the case with the ESM approach.
While the administrative teams can define, deploy and execute their services largely autonomously, the development of an organization-wide service catalog (among other things) creates a variety of dependencies that require comprehensive coordination and collaboration. An ESM service catalog does not stop at functional or departmental boundaries, and many of the individual services affect multiple teams.
Offboarding a departing employee is a good example: the HR department has to take care of contracts, the IT accounts have to be reset and work equipment confiscated, the recruiting team has to re-advertise the position, and so on. An ESM initiative brings great opportunities for the entire organization, but it also involves a lot of coordination activities that increase the complexity of the transformation.
ITSM as inspiration for a comprehensive ESM
How should ITSM and ESM be classified in relation to each other? The transitions are fluid, the tools and processes are similar, and the goals are virtually identical. Although ESM efforts grew out of the ITSM initiatives and experiences of administrative teams, ITSM can now be viewed as a subset of organization-wide enterprise service management.
ESM should permeate and encompass the entire company – and if there is a functioning, well-established ITSM in the organization, there are definitely good starting points and experience for a targeted scaling strategy.
Would you like to read more deeply? Then we have interesting reading for you! Our current white paper offers you an overview and numerous tips for professional, effective ITSM, which can serve as a basis for further ESM initiatives. Download the PDF “How does IT service management work?” here. down!
Further information
SOS IT! What exactly is incident management? And which tools can support you?
ITSM, ITIL and DevOps: what is what? Technical jargon simply explained for IT newbies
Inventory 24/7: What is IT asset management?