How to Become a Tech Hero by Extending ITSM to Enterprise Service Management

Guest Contributor: Isaac Sacolick, President | CIO, StarCIO

Are you using Jira Service Management (JSM) for IT service management (ITSM)? Or maybe IT uses another tool to manage service levels, incidents, requests, standard procedures, and IT asset management.

Now, here’s my real question of the day. Have you considered that other service-oriented departments might benefit by modernizing their workflows, improving their communications, and developing standard practices using JSM and other Atlassian tools, including Jira Software and Confluence? 

Departments such as marketing, human resources, facilities, legal, and others in operations that provide services to people, teams, and other groups need digital collaboration tools now more than at any other time. 

Maybe sending emails to make requests and tracking status in spreadsheets was good enough pre-COVID, or perhaps supporting dozens of work intake processes was the best an organization needed to do. But now, with more organizations supporting hybrid working models, standardizing on an Enterprise Service Management platform to enable teams to develop self-service request forms, workflows, production standards, and communications are essential collaboration capabilities.

Tech Matters: Why Enterprises Struggle with ESM

Let’s also face a fact that slows down many enterprises from establishing enterprise service management. 

Many legacy ITSM tools are hard enough to configure and support IT’s needs. Do you have people on the IT team dedicated to configuring these tools, and no one else can build dashboards, configure workflows, or customize the experience for their team’s needs? Is the tool hard-coded with IT jargon, or is the UX too complicated for business end-users? 

Many legacy ITSM tools have these characteristics, and it’s unlikely you’ll win support from the CMO, CHRO, or heads of facilities and legal to help them configure their workflows in your IT tool. 

Similarly, go onto the app store, and you’ll find many SaaS and mobile tools that provide capabilities to service departments. But, how configurable are these tools, and do they deliver enough capabilities? Some of these tools can do several functions well, but must be paired up with other apps for missing capabilities. When departments go down a path of selecting multiple SaaS tools and apps, integration between them is often needed and may not be trivial to implement. 

And if each department chooses its own tools, well then, the enterprise now has a SaaS playground to pay for, support, and integrate. 

Not exactly Enterprise Service Management! 

There’s a better way to provide best practices and technology capability to service-oriented departments, and we discuss best practices, technologies, and how to find champions in 3 Ways IT Leaders are Doubling Down on Enterprise Service Management.

Examples of Enterprise Service Management Workflows

Let’s look at several common workflows most companies support and are targets for enterprise service management.

1. Employee onboarding experiences often require sign offs and hand offs between HR, facilities, finance, IT, and other departments. How long does it take for an employee to have all the needed tools and systems access to start performing their jobs? And is this a more important and complex workflow today with more businesses seeking hybrid working experiences?
2. Employee offboarding experiences are equally important so that managers oversee transitions, IT recalls company assets, infosec locks down access, and employees leave with a positive brand experience. 
3. Marketing workflows to support sales teams can be even more demanding than the requests ITSM teams respond to from executives who expect white-glove treatment. When revenue and customers are on the line, sales leaders expect marketers to deliver materials and results on time and with superb quality.
4. Data and analytics teams often take on projects and follow agile data practices, but they must also respond to incidents when there are data issues, requests for new dashboards, defects in calculations, and changes when underlying technology components require upgrades. Does that sound like agile workflows Jira Software can handle and service management practices JSM can support?
5. Legal teams provide an important service to all departments that require contract reviews and negotiations. It’s common for legal teams to have a backlog of active requests, and I am certain business managers requesting legal services would love to know the status of their contract reviews and better understand typical timeframes.  
6. Procurement teams in large enterprises often take the lead when new vendors and partners are evaluated, but the work usually requires collaboration with IT, infosec, legal, marketing, and other departments that have a role in the necessary due diligence. Want to speed up the process and reduce bureaucracies? 
7. Learning development programs may be specific to a department, but many programs on topics such as diversity and inclusion, agile ways of working, information security, and training on data technologies target many people in the company. What tools are used to make requests to the learning and development organization, schedule training, and follow up on participant satisfaction? 

These are common examples that occur in enterprises and SMBs, and in some cases, there may be specialized tools for the more complex workflows. But organizations shouldn’t be devoid of service management tools and leave themselves with emails and spreadsheets to manage critical processes.

Doubling Down on Your ITSM Expertise and Platform

So, are you ready to be a service management star in your organization?

In the webinar, 3 Ways IT Leaders are Doubling Down on Enterprise Service Management, we chat about several ways to 

• Use Jira Software to track a marketing department’s 12-hour production sprints 
• Leverage Confluence to create, support, and grow adoption around departmental standards
• Promote hybrid working by rapidly creating enterprise services and workflows in JSM

More importantly, we share several ways to find business champions and how to explain to them the self-service capabilities built into Jira Software, JSM, and Confluence. Service teams benefit from using Jira Software to manage their initiatives with Scrum and Kanban, JSM for intaking requests, and Confluence to publish operating standards. The platform has a common user experience, automation tools, integration widgets, and configuration options to help departmental leaders establish and roll out collaborative practices.

Become a hero, but you are not alone, and you can learn more by example and through partners. You should check out how CBS marketing streamlined complex management processes or how a health engagement company enhanced security controls, audit processes, and service delivery. These are good starting points to kick off your journey into enterprise service management. 

Isaac Sacolick, President of StarCIO, guides companies through smarter, faster, innovative, and safer digital transformation programs that deliver business results. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller, Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation through Technology, an industry speaker, and blogger at Social, Agile, and Transformation. StarCIO offers three agile planning courses for stakeholders, teammates, and certified StarCIO Agile Planners.