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Enterprise Service Management: Why a Unified Platform Matters

Published Date
Author Brooke Tajer

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is the practice of extending IT Service Management (ITSM) principles beyond the IT department to other areas of an organization. ESM aims to digitize and automate business processes, improving communication and collaboration across teams while leveraging a single source of truth. However, many organizations still struggle to fully capitalize on the benefits of ESM. This is where a unified platform for ITSM/ESM, Project Portfolio Management (PPM), and enterprise integration and automation (iPaaS) come in.

With a unified platform for ESM, organizations can empower employees across all departments to better manage projects, assets, service tickets/requests and integrations, resulting in improved process efficiency and accuracy. Using a single platform for ESM, organizations can automate repetitive and manual tasks, freeing up IT from time-consuming service requests, and allowing for fast, seamless service delivery across all teams.

The benefits of a unified ESM platform include:

  • Improved Communication and Collaboration: When all teams are on the same platform, it's easier to communicate and collaborate across departments, reducing team silos and increasing cross-functional productivity.
  • A Centralized Approach: By having a single platform for ITSM/ESM, PPM and iPaaS, organizations can take a centralized approach to service management and delivery, creating a single source of truth for all service requests, workflow management and projects.
  • Increased Efficiency and Productivity: A unified platform streamlines workflows, automates repetitive tasks and enables teams to focus on strategic tasks - improving efficiency and productivity across departments.
  • Comprehensive Insights: A unified ESM platform provides comprehensive insight into service delivery, incident resolution, change management and other key performance metrics, allowing organizations to identify areas for improvement and optimize their operations.
  • Enhanced Service Delivery: By providing fast, seamless and effective service delivery across all departments, a unified ESM platform can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Better Together: Using One Platform to Improve Service, Reduce Toil

At Pima County, they’ve taken a single-platform approach to service management and delivery.

“TeamDynamix is a place where we are really trying to kickstart and accelerate the ideology that automation with the right tools can bring value not just to IT, but to other departments within our organization,” said Mark Hayes, information technology leader, “We’re starting in IT so that they can see the possibilities as we move forward with our digital transformation and expand outside of IT.”

Pima County made the switch to TeamDynamix after using a different system for the last 10 years. Traditionally, the county has taken in tickets through email, phone and a service catalog with base-level triage, but with TeamDynamix in place, they will be able to leverage self-service and automation to serve its citizens better and reduce the drain on employees and resources.

One process automation, in particular, that’s saving significant time is onboarding and offboarding employees – something every organization deals with.

“You don’t need to waste so much time when it comes to onboarding,” Hayes said. “It really is such a sour experience for a new hire to come in, in this day and age, and sit around for three days waiting on their computer to show up. We need to get out of that mode and iPaaS will help us do that.”

And when it comes to offboarding Hayes said, “As a government organization we get audited by the state every year and they want to know what these stale accounts are doing sitting here. Offboarding is currently a very manual process – having to review the list from HR of people who are no longer employed with us and manually revoke their privileges from all the different systems and software and disable their accounts. There’s absolutely no reason for that to not be automated.”

At Nutrabolt, a rapid-growth active health and wellness company based in Austin, Texas, they are using TeamDynamix to automate ticket assignments, create accounts and more. “We had a help desk tool in place, but it was not purposefully built. It was very generic, and there was no discipline in the use of it,” Mark Dittenber, Director of IT, said.

Dittenber and his staff needed a highly flexible and customizable platform that could support new IT processes with automated workflows now, and into the future, as the company’s IT operations continue to mature.

“I liked the lightweight nature of TeamDynamix, as well as its ability to scale with our needs,” he said.

Dittenber and his team were able to implement TeamDynamix in a matter of weeks. They began with IT Service Management and have now expanded to include project management. All the configurations and automation are created without any technical resources on TeamDynamix’s no-code platform.

Within the tool, Mark and his team established customized forms and automated workflows to create network accounts, assign rights and privileges to new teammates, submit and track service requests, request and approve IT changes, provision new devices and more.

As they create new IT processes from the ground up, they’re also building out a knowledge base and a self-service portal. Having thoughtfully crafted processes in place — and the right enterprise service platform to support them — has already made a big impact in just a few months.

“We really notice this when we onboard new teammates, they are ramping much faster,” Dittenber said.

In conclusion, a unified platform for ESM brings many benefits to the table, including increased productivity, efficiency and faster service delivery. By eliminating silos and adopting a centralized approach to service and project management, organizations can achieve a single source of truth for all service requests, improve communication and collaboration and gain comprehensive insights into their operations. With a unified ESM platform, organizations can work better together across departments and achieve their desired goals in an expedited manner.

Want to learn more about Enterprise Service Management? Check out the State of ITSM and ESM Report from InformationWeek.