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What is Enterprise Service Management?
Enterprise Service Management, or ESM for short, is exactly what it says, managing service delivery at an enterprise level. Originating from ITIL principles, specifically around the IT Service Management space, ITSM has evolved over recent years into what is now known as ESM, to include other areas of service management, for example Human Resources and Facilities teams are often familiar with and actively using the same techniques and software platforms to deliver services to their users.
Forrester’s definition of ESM is accurate and to the point: “extending IT service management capabilities beyond technology services to address business-centric use cases; managing service demand and supply through a common platform, portal, and service catalogue; and speeding up innovation and workflow automation through PaaS/low-code development tooling.”
This was traditionally focussed on internal groups of users (or external via managed services) but more recently, it has gained popularity in external facing situations, such as sales teams.
ESM aims to resolve various challenges faced by many organisations, in providing efficient and streamlined solutions for customers. ESM embraces the core principles across an enterprise of; promotion of collaboration, enhancement of productivity, and improving (and measuring) customer satisfaction.
Initially, ESM addresses the challenge of fragmented systems and processes within an organization. By consolidating and centralizing service management functions, ESM eliminates silos and promotes a unified approach to managing services across departments, enable a business to provide consistent service delivery, reduction of duplication of effort, and enhancing coordination between business units.
It also helps to achieve greater visibility and control of services, providing a holistic view of service operations, enabling the tracking and monitoring of service performance, bottlenecks, and to make better, data-driven decisions. This increased visibility enhances operational efficiency and can enable proactive problem-solving.
Thirdly, ESM facilitates effective communication and collaboration within and across teams. It offers a centralised platform for employees to log, track, and resolve service requests. It enables organisations to automate and streamline their service management processes. Through workflow automation, organisations can automate routine tasks, such as incident management, change management, and service request fulfilment.
Finally, it can play a crucial role in enhancing customer satisfaction by delivering true self-service capabilities to users, allowing them to help themselves.
Having been delivering ITSM for decades, we have extensive knowledge of the evolution of ESM from its roots in ITIL and the practice of delivering great service to users, from tool selection, deployment and operationalization, and finally ROI. Below is a summary of the top five ESM tools on the market today:
Freshservice: FreshService is a cloud-based ESM solution that focuses on IT service management. It offers features like incident management, change management, asset management, and service catalogue management, along with a user-friendly interface and automation capabilities. If you need to get up and running fast with a no-nonsense approach to ESM, FreshService is well, a fresh approach. Highly recommended and easy to get started, they have a free trial option to demonstrate just how easy it is. The proof of the pudding? We use it here, and we have deployed it to several clients in the past too.
ServiceNow: We could not make an ESM list without ServiceNow being included. It’s leading ESM platform (although they don’t brand it like that and stuck with a more traditional ITSM and add-ons type offering) that offers a wide range of service management capabilities, including IT service management, human resources service management, customer service management, and more. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for automating and optimizing service delivery processes. Founded in 2004, it was an early adopter of the SaaS model and was a disruptor in the then stagnant ITIL space. It offered the start of the ESM model with facilities and HR service management even back then, as well as a heavily customizable hosted platform for faster (back then) deployment.
Jira Service Management: Jira Service Management, part of the Atlassian suite, is a popular ESM solution that integrates IT service management with agile project management. It offers features like incident management, problem management, change management, and knowledge base management, along with robust collaboration capabilities.
BMC Helix: BMC Helix is an end-to-end ESM platform that combines IT service management, IT operations management, and business workflow automation. It provides advanced analytics, automation, and AI capabilities to streamline service delivery and enhance user experiences.
Microsoft Endpoint Manager: What list could be complete without an MS product – they have one for literally everything you could think of! Microsoft Endpoint Manager combines various management capabilities, including IT service management, device management, and security management. It integrates with Microsoft 365 and Azure for seamless service delivery and user experiences.
These are just a few examples of the many ESM solutions available. When selecting an ESM solution, it is essential to evaluate specific organizational requirements, scalability, integration capabilities, ease of use, and vendor support to determine the best fit for your organization.
Here at FlexAble Business Solutions we partner with and “drink our own champagne” with Fresh, and Fresh Service is just one of those products that we can’t get enouigh of. From their humble beginnings around a decade ago, providing a super simple IT Service Desk tool (still available today, but as part of the bigger ESM product) at a great, flexible (or FlexAble?) price, they have listened to customer feedback and requests and grown to a 5000 strong enterprise providing many more services. You can really manage your whole business with their toolset out of the box.
Still not sure how to proceed? Just book a slot with us to review your options and understand how ESM can help your business, then just CLICK HERE and we can get started on improving your customer service and experience right away.