ESM (a.k.a. Enterprise Service Management) sprang into the spotlight when people started realizing just how valuable ITSM was and wanted more of it. A service, after all, is a service—whether it’s for IT or not. And ESM extends ITSM practices to business processes, enabling you to:
- Standardize service delivery across the company.
- Improve service experiences for all functions.
- Increase service and support performance.
- Cut service costs and accelerate time to value.
But how does ESM actually work in the real world? What kinds of projects yield the highest value to the business? For answers to these and other questions, we turned to Dean Clayton, international product manager and ESM expert at Micro Focus.
Question: How does IT go about extending ITSM to other lines of business?
Dean Clayton: Let’s take a simple example: Human Resources. All HR departments handle requests and queries from employees—whether for hiring purposes (that’s a service) or to clarify benefits (that’s support). HR departments also have a wealth of information (like knowledge articles) for employees.
Other than handling some HR access control requirements, which a good service management solution will do, you can get your HR team up and running on your ITSM solution just as you would any other team within IT. From the HR perspective, there’s an extra bonus—they now have a full audit trail of the requests they receive.
Question: What other lines of business can benefit from ESM?
Dean Clayton: Facilities Management is another low hanging fruit that’s ripe for adding into your service management solution. When it comes to tracking support requests, what’s the difference between sending an IT engineer to fix a printer jam or a maintenance engineer to repair a faulty air conditioner?
Of course, existing Facilities Management tools or processes might slow you down. But beyond that, the key is to showcase quick time to value by finding opportunities for strengthening operational efficiency.
Question: Can you talk more about showcasing quick time to value?
Dean Clayton: A good service management solution allows you to build your own apps with low code/no code capabilities, so you can showcase quick time to value. In most organizations, there are countless business processes being tracked or managed via Excel that could easily be implemented within your service management solution in just a few hours. Not days, but hours.
One example that highlights value for Facilities Management relates to site visitors. Typically, Reception needs a list of everyone coming to a site on a given day. They need to know who the host is, who needs parking, who needs security clearance, who’s checked in, who’s checked out. While this use case may not be at the top of the Facilities Management priority list, you can use it to demonstrate the benefits of piloting ESM at a single office.
Low code/no code capabilities also make it possible to quickly fine-tune processes based on feedback, allowing for a continual improvement journey. For example, perhaps Facilities Management wants to automatically send out notifications when someone arrives on site. Or maybe they want to auto-allocate or manage parking spaces. When the line of business sees what’s possible, they’ll start coming to you with more ideas on how they can leverage your service management solution for other processes.
Question: What are the benefits to employees?
Dean Clayton: Let’s take the HR example. Now employees can go to one place for everything they need. And because IT and HR are integrated, hiring managers no longer need to think about who to contact first for onboarding a new employee. They can raise a single request and tasks can be allocated to the appropriate IT and non-IT teams.
For the Facilities Management example, imagine an employee who has someone coming to visit next week. You can easily configure the visitor registration app, then the employee can easily register the visitor from the service portal. Simple. There’s no need for the employee or the receptionist to consolidate details sent via emails or phone calls.
Question: The key takeaway for me is that ESM simplifies processes and delivers quick time to value for the rest of the business. Do I have that right?
Dean Clayton: That is exactly right. It changes the way that IT interacts with other departments, and that’s a good thing for any business.
SMAXTEMBER 2022—Your Chance to Learn More
Given the rise in ESM, we decided that now would be the perfect time to bring you SMAXTEMBER 2022—a month of fun, informative activities (including daily webinars with live Q&As) centered around proven service management solution Micro Focus SMAX. At SMAXTEMBER, we’ll cover three key themes:
- Getting started with SMAX
- Automating with SMAX
- Integrating with SMAX
Also—mark your calendar for Tuesday, 20 September, because that’s when we’ll hold the SMAXTEMBER 2022—London Forum. This is your chance to meet in person with Micro Focus experts, our partners, and your peers to discuss trends, challenges, and best practices for IT and ESM.
It doesn’t matter if you’re new to SMAX, already a SMAXPERT, or somewhere in between. There’s something for everyone and it’s going to be SMAXCITING! We look forward to seeing you there.
Register for SMAXTEMBER 2022—London Forum
