Enterprise Service Management (ESM) continues to evolve, with leading providers like Atlassian continuing to push the boundaries of what is technically and strategically possible by aligning features and workflows with tangible outcomes for your business. By choosing an experienced global Atlassian solution partner such as Valiantys to assess your needs, as well as configure and customize your instances, businesses around the world can tap into an unparalleled opportunity to stay ahead of the competition on all fronts.
The global context
Amid the disruption and ensuing chaos brought about by a global pandemic, Enterprise Service Management (ESM) platforms have proven critical in helping businesses to move quickly, adapt to remote environments and facilitate complex processes. From managing staff and resources to ensuring uninterrupted services, shrewd enterprises found solace in ESMs, allowing their teams to find a firm footing from which to keep working efficiently and with the right levels of support and interaction they needed.
ESM in 2022
As we move into 2022, ESM’s credentials are inspiring – there has been a definite upsurge in adoption and usage, with ESM extended to even more diverse areas of business than originally anticipated. Not only is ESM delivering measurable results, it is also creating new value in unexpected ways across entire organisations.
But ESM is just an extension of ITSM. What is all the fuss about?
ESM applies many of the key concepts of IT Service Management (ITSM) to other areas of your business. While ITSM has been around for longer, ESM is different for a number of reasons. It is not just a fashionable change of name, but rather an evolution of key work principles, extended and applied to other parts of your business in order to reap similar benefits. Towards the end of 2021, Atlassian was recognised as a clear leader in this space by the Forrester Wave™ Enterprise Service Management report, reflecting superiority not only in terms of current offerings, but also in terms of their strategic vision for this space. This last point is worth pondering as we look to the future of ESM and consider the key role it plays in helping businesses recover, rebuild, and discover new opportunities for growth in a post-pandemic world.
Choosing an ESM platform
When businesses consider the suitability of any given ITSM or ESM platform, they often make comparisons in terms of technical features alone. The final decision might be made by any combination of CEOS, CXOs, CTOs or CIOs based on finding a close fit with existing processes, or a desire to find new ways to improve these. Other commonly overlooked drivers for changing platforms relate to optimising a return on investment (ROI) and lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO). But these approaches yield short-term wins at best. The real case for going “all in” and using Enterprise Service Management throughout your organization, should be underpinned by a determination to reap extended benefits and achieve a noticeable shift towards better business practices through smarter execution.
For instance:
- ESM enables service owners to adopt the winning traits and methods of product developers when it comes to assessing demand, evaluating costs or continuously working towards improvement. ESM helps to identify gaps or bottlenecks in your workflows, and combines user data and customer feedback to tackle necessary changes in a much faster, targeted and efficient manner than previously possible.
- ESM is far more than just a set of tools for your organisation. Sophisticated ESMs such as Atlassian’s Jira Service Management are built on an underlying philosophy of working smarter across all levels of your organization. This can be a real game-changer when it comes to dealing with requests internal to your organisation, as well as from your customers.
- An increase in visibility and sharing of information leads to better awareness and accountability, but it doesn’t end there. ESMs help to anticipate demand, identify potential problems even before they happen, and mitigate risks. The shift from passive or reactive support to a more interactive experience is likely to gather momentum as artificial intelligence, third-party integrations and meaningful business intelligence yields actionable data with increasing reliability.
- ESM and, perhaps more traditionally, ITSM, have delivered their biggest successes within service organizations. These range from traditional IT providers & software development companies to retail, and even the Banking and Financial Services Industry. But ESM is clearly no longer confined to niche applications or to specific business units.
ESM continues to evolve, providing better integration of disparate sources of data, bridging or closing the gap on cross-platform compatibility and helping organizations to reassess the way their teams connect, collaborate and accomplish their work. In short, Enterprise Service Management helps to unify workflows and people, allowing diverse entities such as sales, production, IT operations and marketing teams to collaborate on common ground. ESM can further integrate products like CRM and ERP to deliver meaningful insights to key decision-makers. The bottom line is better all-around team collaboration with improved support and efficiency when dealing with a given request or task, resulting in cost savings by streamlining processes and automating support.
Okay, so ESM is great. But aren’t all platforms similar?
While the overall benefits of ESM are relatively well-understood, it is also clear that not all ESM platforms are considered equal. Most often, clients have found themselves frustrated with a baffling array of functionality, and locked into a frustratingly complex system fraught with unexpected or spiralling costs. This is why Valiantys is also a global leader in helping clients to migrate to Atlassian solutions from competitor platforms that simply haven’t upheld their promise.
Key findings of the Forrester Wave™ ESM report
In ranking the various ESM contenders, the Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management, Q4 2021 report evaluated current offerings but also looked at where the sector is headed. In this respect, Atlassian ranked highly in terms of usability, speed-to-value, and flexibility with “Jira Service Management judged to be a good fit for organizations looking for a comprehensively integrated service management platform for development, operations, and business teams”.1
Extrapolating the findings of this report, it is equally instructive to compare the price/performance ratio among the top contenders in this category. Here, once again, Atlassian’s positioning of providing more than 80% of the nearest competitor’s features for just 20% of the price is a real eye-opener and raises the bar in terms of value delivered to the client.
There is no doubt about just how far companies like Atlassian & Valiantys have come by truly listening to their customers and understanding their needs. By taking a user-centric approach that goes far beyond technology considerations, the result is a vastly improved quality experience for employees (ultimately, the true end-users of any ESM solution) and much higher rates of adoption.
Rather than enforcing a “one size fits all”, Atlassian tools can be customised, configured and scaled to match the growth and changing needs of enterprises. By leveraging the unparalleled knowledge and experience of platinum solution partners such as Valiantys, your business needs can be fully assessed prior to deployment, which itself can be managed in phases or all at once, depending on the complexity of the project – but always in a way that makes sense for you and your customers.
Sources:
1. Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management, Q4 2021 report
"Atlassian is a good fit for organizations looking for a comprehensively integrated service management platform for development, operations, and business teams."
