At
its most simple the basic principle of Service Management is the
ability to respond quickly and effectively to a customer demand
requesting something, reporting something is broken or searching for
information to enable a task or action.
These working practices
have been adopted successfully in IT for a number of years and we, as IT
people, are conditioned to a level of process formality and rigour in
our operations that should, in most cases, make us more effective.
Process improvement and automation feature in our every-day vocabulary.
The question we now ask ourselves, especially with the success of Enterprise Automation platforms like ServiceNow,
is can we apply the same working practices across our entire
organisation? The answer is a resounding yes, from a service perspective
the work we are handling is either a request, a fault or a need for
information, no matter what department we are in.
If we can take
Service Management beyond IT by improving and automating processes in
Customer Services, HR, Facilities or Finance, to name a few, then we
have a very compelling and repeatable model for moving work around the
business in the most effective way.
IT Service Management
The
ITIL set of best practices for IT service management were created in
the 1980s with the aim of delivering better quality, client-focused
services while also driving more efficient use of IT resources. The best
practices are considered as a process framework to be adopted and
adapted by an organisation dependent on their priorities and objectives.
The
IT Service Management Processes haven’t changed a great deal over the
last 10 years but the drive to increase efficiency and speed delivery
continues. Technology solutions look to capitalise on this by automating
the provisioning of services and management of work across the
organisation.
This has resulted in an explosion of Service
Management related applications, initially focused on specific
processes, sometimes bolted together to provide an ITIL or ITSM toolset
but rarely offering a seamless employee experience or single system of
record.
ServiceNow, conceived as a flexible development platform,
was initially targeted at IT and was the first to take the ITIL best
practices and build applications natively on the platform. The ability
to request, receive, assign, manage and measure work across the IT
organisation; to understand how services were performing (and costing)
and to provide total visibility across the Enterprise, all within a
cloud-based single system of action set the bar across the industry.
These principles for managing work across a department and for
providing customers with the ability to self-serve were then taken
beyond IT and across the organisation to HR, Facilities, Finance and now
outside the organisation with Customer Service Management.
Beyond IT – HR
One
of the earliest contenders for expanding beyond IT was HR. Originally
driven from the desire to better manage the employee onboarding process
and provide an overall better experience to a new employee, customers
began to build case management solutions to handle other HR-related
requests. ServiceNow recognised this demand and through several
iterations now offers a world-class system of engagement for employees
interacting with HR.
Beyond IT – Customer Service Management
ServiceNow
has recognised that these same principles can be applied to Customer
Service Management. Traditional approaches to Customer Service have
focused on the Call Center model; responding quickly and hopefully
effectively to each question or complaint as it is reported however it
is reported, better still deflect those interactions completely with a
customer self-service model to reduce cost. The speed of which the
question or issue is resolved is paramount as is the provision of
friendly, high-quality response to elicit high customer satisfaction.
Identifying the reasons why the issues are occurring in the first place
so that they can be permanently resolved requires joining customer
support with business operations and applying the same Service
Management disciplines to Customer Service. Doing this on a single
platform gives ServiceNow customers the ability to resolve customer
issues at lightspeed.
Beyond IT – Custom Applications
In
our experience once our customers have successfully implemented
ServiceNow across IT and have extended the ServiceNow experience into
some of the shared service departments demand from the business to
automate processes on ServiceNow starts to snowball. Provided there is
the capability to respond to this demand and effectively it is possible
to stand up a new application to manage work or automate a process in a
matter of days or weeks. Stop saying no and start saying yes.
So
the opportunity to deliver Enterprise Service Management is greater than
ever before. We’ve been pragmatically fulfilling, fixing and providing
information in IT for years so let’s take all of that experience and
apply it across the entire organisation today!
