Supporting Digital Transformation with Enterprise Service Management

Digital transformation is revolutionizing how the public sector operates and delivers value to employees and citizens. By integrating digital technologies into all aspects of operations, state and local governments are changing the game. As business needs evolve, the role of Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is becoming increasingly important in supporting this digital transformation.

With ESM you can streamline service delivery processes, align tech stacks, improve security and governance over data and APIs, gain better visibility into all of the work and projects happening and above all, enhance the user experience.

In this article, we’ll explain the concept of ESM and explore its core principles with real examples of how it’s being deployed.

Defining Enterprise Service Management (ESM)

Enterprise Service Management is a holistic approach that extends the traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) framework to other departments within an organization, such as HR, finance or facilities. It involves the implementation of service management best practices, processes and tools across the entire enterprise, with the primary goal of delivering a seamless and efficient service experience to both internal and external customers.

The core concepts of ESM include:

1. Service orientation: Adopting a service mindset that focuses on delivering value to customers by understanding and fulfilling their needs.
2. Process standardization: Implementing consistent, best-practice processes across the organization to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
3. Automation and integration: Leveraging technology to automate repetitive tasks and integrate disparate systems, reducing manual effort and streamlining service delivery.
4. Performance measurement: Continuously monitoring and measuring the performance of services and processes to drive continuous improvement.

ESM differs from traditional IT services in that it goes beyond the IT department, encompassing all areas of the organization to create a more unified and customer-centric approach. This makes ESM applicable to organizations across various sectors, including healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing and more.

Current industry trends such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) have accelerated the need for ESM as an essential IT strategy. These technologies demand a more agile and integrated approach to service management, which ESM effectively addresses.

When looking for an ESM vendor, it’s important to consider features and functionality. You’ll want to find a vendor that offers an ESM platform that’s complex enough for IT’s needs but is simple enough to use outside of IT. No-code ESM platforms that combine ESM with Project Portfolio Management and integration and automation (through iPaaS) all on a single platform are ideal as they provide a better ROI with a faster time to value for organizations.

Pima County, AZ Using One Platform to Improve Service, Reduce Toil

With more than 1 million residents living in Pima County, top-notch service delivery is essential for the Pima County government, and that means investing in the right tools and retaining employees as the county moves through its digital transformation.

For Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, much of the digital transformation work starts in IT, “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. 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 for IT Service Management (ITSM) 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 better serve its citizens and reduce the drain on employees and resources.

“Prior to TeamDynamix, we didn’t have the ability to automate things and build workflows to do things that eliminate toil and redundancy for our employees,” Hayes said.

With TeamDynamix now in place, Pima County is looking to automate and integrate as much of the manual ITSM processes into workflows as they can.

“That’s something the organization is really just starting to comprehend as a vision that we want to get to overall,” Hayes said referring to automation. “My goal and hope is to make sure people understand the possibilities of workflow beyond just getting approvals routed because that’s all that we really do today.”

Beyond automating ITSM tasks and processes, Pima County is also investing in TeamDynamix iPaaS – integration platform as a service. With iPaaS, the county is looking to integrate systems beyond just IT to automate processes like onboarding and offboarding employees.

“We are starting small, hoping to use automation to take tickets and automatically deploy software to endpoints, to onboard and offboard users with Active Directory and distribution groups,” Hayes said.

When it comes to onboarding new hires, the county’s goal is to have new employees arrive on day one with everything they need to get to work, “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 is going to help us do that.”

In addition, using iPaaS to automate offboarding will save countless hours for a process that is normally very manual and heavily audited as Pima County is a government entity.

“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,” Hayes said. “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 revoking their privileges from all the different systems and software and disabling their accounts. There’s absolutely no reason for that to not be automated. iPaaS is going to help us a lot with this and save us time.”

While the digital transformation journey is starting in IT at Pima County, there are plans for TeamDynamix to expand outside of IT for true Enterprise Service Management.

“The drudgery of working through mundane, repetitive tasks doesn’t exist just in IT,” Hayes said. “I think the more we can reduce toil within the departments that we support, the more people are going to buy in and understand the value of what we’re trying to achieve. There’s nothing like success to breed more success, and once other departments see the benefits they’re going to want these tools too.”

And it’s that success that IT is starting to realize with ESM and iPaaS from TeamDynamix, “We’ve been able to use our success to drive additional headcount in our organization, to do more and better things,” Hayes said.

“As we begin to do automation via workflows it’s only going to make it better,” Hayes concluded. “We’re lucky in that our leadership understands that as the world has changed, IT has become the center of everything. They know that the more they invest in us, the more they can reap benefits and savings in other places.”

To learn more about TeamDynamix and digital transformation check out the TeamDynamix Resource Hub.