An Introduction to Enterprise Service Management
When enterprise service management is the subject, the discussion almost always veers quickly toward technology and vendors. But success here requires more than just the best available technology. Atlassian customers extending ESM principles into asset-heavy departments can leverage Jira Service Desk Asset Management to bring discovery-backed asset data into the same platform where service requests and incident workflows already operate.
Organizations building their ESM practice on Atlassian’s ecosystem should evaluate how Jira IT Service Management, combined with Virima’s discovery and CMDB capabilities, can extend service management principles beyond IT into HR, facilities, and other business functions.
Enterprise Service Management Begins With Business Processes
Design, select, and implement great service management technologies with the overarching goal of improving business operations. Ensure your chosen solutions align with business processes and goals.
This can require ventures into new areas of collaboration and cooperation between your IT and business leaders and teams.
(See, Why your business requires a modern CMDB?)
After all, your IT people don’t – and shouldn’t – define business goals or the operational processes intended to achieve them. To align enterprise service management solutions with goals and processes, the IT team needs awareness of those goals and processes.
Similarly, your business counterparts should contribute to – but not drive – decisions about service management technologies. The two areas on which their contributions should focus are user experience and reporting features. User experience directly affects user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity.
Reporting features, including the ability to build dashboards, are how business decision makers turn complex data into actionable information. The same reporting features IT uses to identify technical challenges and opportunities for improvement may provide similarly useful insights to business decision-makers. Equally important for end-user adoption is a well-structured IT Self-Service Portal that presents service catalog items, knowledge articles, and request forms in a way that empowers users across the enterprise to resolve their own issues without engaging IT staff directly.
The same reporting features IT uses to identify technical challenges and opportunities for improvement may provide similarly useful insights to business decision-makers. For example, dashboards that track MTBF vs service availability give both IT and business stakeholders a shared language for evaluating infrastructure reliability against SLA commitments.
User experience and reporting are arguably the two most user-centric areas of focus for IT management. Therefore, involve business users in selecting and configuring relevant enterprise service management technologies.
How to Plan for Success
To succeed with business-driven enterprise service management, your business needs mechanisms that enable and support collaboration between your IT and business teams. This can begin with something as simple as an email distribution list and official letters .
As those IT-business collaborations grow in number and scope, regular meetings that include business and IT representatives may be more effective than regular emails alone.
At a growing number of companies, IT and business leaders choose to build a service management office (SMO). This parallels the structure and benefits of a project management office (PMO), but focuses on the IT-powered services on which the business relies.
If there is a successful PMO at your business, it may provide a model for your SMO. And an SMO based on a proven PMO may gain the executive sponsorship and support it needs to succeed more quickly.
Collaboration Signals a Growing Organization
Whatever organizational moves you make, they should focus on enabling and supporting collaboration between the IT teams that develop and deliver services and the business teams that use them. And that collaboration should focus on achieving and executing a business-driven approach to services and service management.
As that collaboration grows, it should actively ensure that technology selection and deployment decisions fully incorporate the needs and desires of business users. This means, for example, how easy it is to create and customize reports may be just as important as more technical considerations. If not more so.
To succeed with service management, your business requires your IT and business teams to regularly engage in conversations about designing and delivering services. Initiate and establish this collaboration before making any specific technology choices.
Such an approach can help to ensure that every service generates maximum levels of user satisfaction and business value.
Virima: Your Enterprise Service Management Partner
Virima’s solutions for IT Asset Discovery, ITAM and ITSM are designed to tame your biggest IT and service management challenges. They are also designed to deliver the features and experiences your users need and want.
In addition, they’re built to be easy to use and configure, and to produce useful, actionable reports about your IT environment, for IT managers and business decision makers. These features can help you and your service management team improve IT and business services and support, today and tomorrow.
For the growing number of ESM adopters running on Atlassian, that partnership shows up most clearly as a Jira service management CMDB powered by Virima. A Jira service management CMDB pairs Virima’s automated discovery, blueprints, and ViVID service mapping with Jira’s native ITSM workflows, so the CIs you use for incident, change, and request management are all backed by live, validated data. That data foundation is what makes ESM goals — user experience, reporting, IT-business alignment — practical rather than aspirational.
Virima features can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users.
Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
