supports their business goals in the most efficient and effective way possible.
ESM in practice
I’ve had some recent experience of the benefits of developing ESM. I’ve been working with our Sales and Marketing Department. A small team of dedicated and talented staff whose scope is considerable. They were overwhelmed by requests for all sorts of things, some they expected and some they didn’t.
Their challenge - “How can we control this but still make sure we are delivering the services expected of us?”
So many things were deemed by their customers as “business critical” or "…important because it came from a senior manager" and the act of trying to decide who should do what for whom was inconsistently applied and causing some angst within the team who were just keen to deliver the best service they could.
They decided a workshop to explore their challenges was the way to move forward.
With guidance and facilitation, they could see how service management principles could help.
The reason for this is simple. It’s all about ‘services’, delivering customer and business outcomes, so why call the IT part out?
ESM is a process-based approach to aligning the delivery of information technology (IT) services with the needs of the organisation that uses them. So it makes sense, anywhere where you have a need for a consistent approach to delivering a service using process flow is a good idea. The benefits for those delivering the services is an understanding of both the defined activities that will guide their actions and the required outcomes they need to deliver. For the receiver of the service (customer or user depending on your terminology usage), this means a consistent and measured approach to the delivery of the service each time they engage with the provider. It’s a ‘WIN-WIN’.
The other thing about service management is that it elevates the provider from a professionalism point of view. Having a service provider that can tell the story of what they offer demonstrates their focus on service. For years, frameworks like ITIL have been emphasising how important it is for the service provider to understand what value looks like and generate an approach to delivering service that is consistent and measured and