Selecting an ITSM/ESM partner is an important decision, but it can become riddled with complexity if you’re not sure what features you need most, and why. While IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) solutions are continuously innovating and enhancing their capabilities, there is always room for improvement. There are solutions out there giving organizations the technology they require to meet tomorrow’s challenges while leaving room to become future-proof. So we ask you, what are your business’s top criteria when selecting an ITSM/ESM solution?
We recently shared a recording of our joint webinar with partner HaloITSM. You can find a copy of that recording here.
In this blog we are going to break down the following points:
• Beginning to digitize your organization
• How to build a productive and efficient working environment
• How to improve governance at your organization
• Centralizing the management of all your services
• Enhancing communication and collaboration
• Best practices for picking a solution you can grow with
Beginning to digitize your organization
Request Management and workflow processes are the most common needs of additional departments brought into your ESM Platform. They include the basics, such as:
• Who is the requestor?
• What are they requesting?
• Who is working on it?
• When do they need it?
• Likely, some sort of classification
• Notes on the work’s progress
• Ability to assign tasks
• Approvals, if needed
• Automation
• Metrics on things like MTTR
How to build a productive and efficient working environment
Your ESM Platform already does request management quite well, it’s just a matter of replicating and extending this process to other departments.
We need to understand the specific needs of that department, as it will differ from an IT Request Management process. For example)
• SLAs are likely not needed but could be leveraged
• The service catalog might be simpler, i.e. two tiers instead of three
• The number and manner of metric data points will differ slightly
• Automation needs will vary
It is a process of determining their specific requirements using the IT Request Management model as a baseline example.
How to improve governance at your organization
By having all these various departments leveraging a common platform to manage their work and workflows, we can provide a better level of governance for the overall work efforts, as well as, the individual department work efforts.
This will allow us to align with the:
• Business Goals
• Business Strategy
• Business Value
Centralizing the management of all your services
By leveraging a platform like HaloITSM, you start with a solid base of ITSM and ESM processes. The HaloITSM platform includes collaboration tools to help you stay connected, keep to deadlines, and manage projects effectively.
HaloITSM offers an integrated ITSM Platform to capture your entire ITIL process within a single cloud-based system, so your team can manage and track all assets, projects, and tickets with ease.
A Real-Time Project Dashboard will share a live view of all projects. This allows you to gain clarity and visibility. This simple dashboard updates automatically, so you can keep track of projects and make resource spend transparent.
Task Management so you can stay on top of your workload by organizing your projects and tasks in one centralized system. Integrate your apps, connect your calendar to sync all your meetings and appointments, and assign users tasks to track your teams’ work.
HaloITSM offers a Single Organizational Service Desk for your team to take advantage of HaloITSM’s all-inclusive nature. By extending into the entire organization, it creates a single system that provides centralized mission control for business operations.
Enhancing Communication and Collaboration
By having departments leverage a common platform, we provide more effective, standardized communications and workflows. Some departments i.e., HR may need to be siloed to protect the confidentiality of requests, while other departments may desire to be cross-functional and collaborative. By using a common platform, affords us the ability to deliver the data collection and functional needs for each department, whether they be siloed or cross-functional departments.
Enterprise Service Management provides a uniform way to create requests and complete onboarding, ultimately leading to improved communication and collaboration. However, beyond just providing uniform procedures, ESM makes it easier to collaborate even when working remotely.
Not only does this empower employees, but it also allows them to manage their tasks better while improving employee retention. Providing an omnichannel (or one-stop-shop) experience to your employees can be the difference between frustration and satisfaction – but combining these channels also means the knowledge can spread more easily.
Lastly, here is a list of best practices for picking a solution you can grow with:
• Codeless configuration
• Ease of configuration changes/Administration
• Ability to add custom process area content
• Advanced security features
• Ability to silo process areas, when needed.
• Options for single or multiple self-service sites
• Ability to leverage a common service catalog or deliver separate service catalogs as required
• ESM-enabling capabilities
• Employee experience
• Service delivery capabilities beyond IT
• System integrations
• Performance improvement & optimization
• Alignment with best practice frameworks
• The total cost of ownership
• Quick time to value & ease of change
• Quality of vendor and partner relationship
Find a copy of HaloITSM’s product roadmap here.
