Unify and automate: The keys to a modern enterprise service ecosystem

Martin Stewart - Sep 23, 2024

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is about modernizing your corporate service ecosystem so that day-to-day service transactions and support interactions happen quickly and efficiently—across your whole organization.

To achieve this, ESM applies a modern, unified operating model to the way services are managed:

Replace non-scalable, one-to-one communication channels (like phone and email) with scalable digital channels (such as a web portal, chatbot, or enterprise collaboration system channel).
Replace sticky notes, spread sheets, and email boxes with a mature, digital queue management capability that enables visibility and prioritization, plus load balancing and reporting.
Replace manual work and ad-hoc processes with digital workflows and automations that ensure quick, effective outcomes for customers—every time.

In theory, any service team in an organization can achieve these three things. But most don't. The lack of a clear path to success (and the burden of daily operations) holds back service teams from achieving real, game-changing efficiency.

Fragmentation is the cause of most ESM pains

Most ESM pains come from having a fragmented landscape—with different systems, processes, and data stores across service teams. The resulting friction slows delivery. Lack of standardization means inconsistent and unreliable outcomes for employees. Information and processes don’t flow freely. Risks can’t be spotted early. Change is slow. Efficiency is low and the employee experience is poor.

While teams work in soloes, the volume and type of demands being put on service teams aren’t clearly understood. Tracking the patterns across the internal service ecosystem isn’t possible, making it difficult to prioritise and load-balance work. This is a primary driver of burnout and staff churn. Staff are stressed-out by a never-ending mountain of tedious, routine requests.

The detailed picture of the work being done in response to requests isn’t visible because most of the discussions and thinking happen outside of a system—making it difficult to achieve consistency. Time spent looking for information, rediscovering old solutions, and inefficient handovers drains productivity—but the causes cannot easily be resolved when they remain unseen in a fragmented ecosystem.

Without a common system of record for service management, process, policy and regulatory adherence can’t be applied or tracked—meaning risks cannot be easily spotted and driven out of the system. As a result, service teams remain in a reactive, fire-fighting mode.

Without a unification, organizations cannot achieve the visibility, efficiency, and agility they need.

Unify for higher efficiency

The true power of enterprise service management comes from a whole-enterprise approach. Deliberate unification of all service teams and all service consumers on a single, common, digital platform gives all your teams a clear framework to work within. When all your service teams are using a common digital service platform, the symptoms of fragmentation (and the associated costs, inefficiencies, and risks) are driven out of your service ecosystem.

Find out more: ESM is digital transformation for your enterprise service ecosystem

Unify for better Employee Experience

As well as transforming back-office service operations, a unified Enterprise Service Management approach also transforms the front-of-house Employee Experience (EX). In a fragmented service ecosystem, employees must navigate a complex map of service teams, phone numbers, email addresses, and web portals. Sometimes it isn't clear which team can help them with their request or issue, so they have to make multiple requests for assistance before they get what they need. It's the sort of friction that employees don't want to experience in their consumer lives—and don't expect to have to put up with in the workplace.

ESM replaces this clunky, fractured experience with a single, streamlined, digital-first employee experience. One web portal. One phone number. All services under one roof. Unification delivers the ultimate simplicity. One place to go for services, help, and information. All the complexity of the back-office service landscape is hidden from them, saving them time and frustration every time they need help.

Find out more: Unified service portal

Find out more: Improve your employee experience (EX) with AI

Automate for game-changing efficiency

Most service teams in an organization are spending 50% or more of their time on routine administrative tasks. These demands are often an unseen part of the enterprise workload landscape. If you’ve ever wondered why multi-team projects run late, this unseen work is often a major factor—with daily operations tasks getting in the way of progress with projects.

The reality is that with modern work automation, up to 90% of service interactions and up to 80% of routine workloads are easily automatable.

With Hornbill automation, you can quickly kill those work queues and make time to get important project work done. You can replace a manual process with a fully automated workflow in just a few minutes.

Drag-and-drop orchestration and automation of workflows makes it possible to drive a shift in focus from 80% operational work to 80% transformational work. This translates into a 4X increase in capacity to support new projects—which in turn translates into a 10X acceleration in the throughput of business transformation projects. From the employee perspective, services are delivered at digital speed, having eliminated all the manual steps that were holding them back.

Find out more: Enterprise automation is the biggest transformation opportunity for 2020s

Find out more: Connect workflows to systems to automate processes with ease