The YaSM Blog
December 20, 2016 By Stefan Kempter Enterprise Service Management YaSM concepts
In an earlier blog post I wrote about AXELOS promoting the more widespread use of ITIL® beyond the framework's traditional use in IT.
There are now new signs that this idea is gaining traction:
Enterprise service management (ESM) is the over-arching theme for the annual itSMF conference in Germany in 2017 - surely a strong hint that the service management community is taking the topic very seriously and sees it as a new source for growth.
When searching on Google for "enterprise service management", the top results are mostly from vendors of service management tools. It seems the providers of ITSM tools are taking the lead in popularizing the idea of applying ITSM best practice outside of IT.
A number of companies that many of us would still regard as vendors of ITSM tools actively promote the use of their offerings in all sorts of service-oriented companies or business functions.
Some, it appears, even prefer not to be seen as "ITSM tool vendors" at all: ServiceNow, for example, now speak of themselves as the "Enterprise Cloud Company". IT service management is mentioned as only one of several areas where its tools can be applied; other areas are customer support in general, facilities, HR, legal, marketing, etc.
Other vendors, such as Axios Systems and HEAT Software, don't deny their roots in ITSM quite yet, but they certainly tout the use of their products for ESM.
So this whole push for enterprise service management is driven in part by readily available tools.
The tools are mostly used in the space of customer service and support, where the time-tested helpdesk applications and self-service portals help service providers work more efficiently and effectively.
Of course, these are only the low-hanging fruits, promising quick results.
But service providers shouldn't stop there:
As in IT service management, where the support processes like incident and service request management were the typical starting points for adopting ITSM best practice, the full benefits will be reaped by organizations that go further.
These organizations understand that the real point of enterprise service management is to manage their services across the whole service lifecycle:
This enables service providers to stay focused on customer needs and be successful in the long run, by continually learning from past failures and successes.
All of the above suggests that ESM is evolving into a more widely accepted concept, and "enterprise service management" is emerging as a new catchphrase, used by people who speak or write about the "use of (IT) service management best practice beyond IT".
If you would like to learn more about the history of enterprise service management and what it is about, please read on in the YaSM Wiki.
Ask questions and share your thoughts in the YaSM community.
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