Understanding Enterprise Service Management (ESM)

Matt Peters

Hello everyone, and thanks for joining us today for our discussion of Enterprise Service Management. Today, we're going to be taking you through an understanding of both what ESM is, and what it means to organizations, as well as some of the mechanics and logistics for how organizations deploy ESM, and experience value from it.

Matt

I'm also joined today by Jim Wootten, who is our vice president, and is responsible specifically for enterprise service management as an offering from CAI.

Matt

In effect, it is born out of ITSM, or Information Technology Service Management, and that's likely a term that you're already familiar with to one degree or another. ITSM is really the methodological foundation on which ESM is built. The idea is essentially that we need the discipline and the methodology that IT has successfully been using for years now in order to track intake of demand, manage tickets, set and reset priority, address change management, complications and needs across the organization, the entire ITIL framework that allows IT to deliver safely, securely, and functionally across many organizations. That principle, those methods that we use in order to get that value understanding, deployment capability, ESM is an application of that rigor across a wider array of delivery services across the organization. So you can think of it like managing HR, or finance, or any other back office operations similarly to how we manage IT.

Matt

So at the engagement level, that's really what we're talking about here. We're talking about bringing the value that IT is able to experience by tracking every request they need to be able to address, every piece of work that they have to be able to get done as a ticket, or an incident, or a work request, an item of work to be prioritized, engaged, and completed, and to apply that literally everywhere. What this does for us is a couple of different things. It gives us a different mechanism for engaging with the entire organization. It unifies a lot of the experiences that employees are used to, but it also drives a lot toward the value that organizations are able to deliver to their customers, or their constituents. And in reality, there are a wide variety of good reasons for an organization to be invested and engaged in ESM, and its underlying methodologies.

Matt

We'll get into some more specific examples of that a little bit later in this talk, but at a high level, what ESM allows for is that by tracking and managing all of our back office operations across an organization in the same way, we can condense the number of applications that we need in order to support the entire enterprise. From that, we typically see a lot of reduction in operational costs just from the simple standpoint of reducing the total number of platforms that are required in order to deliver services like this. But that's not a reality that every organization can necessarily realize, and it's not a requirement for ESM either. By treating all workflows, and all tracking, and evaluation methods effectively the same way, we also reduce the complexity of integrating other systems to an ITSM platform that is able to actually treat every incident, or every work item as a ticket.

Matt

So most organizations are going to experience a cost reduction when they are able to lift the entire organizational methodology into an ESM framework, either through reduction in licensing costs, or reduction in cost of ownership of integrating disconnected systems into one another. Both of those things essentially have the same outcome, which is really just standardization of that experience across the entire landscape of the organization, and that ultimately has multiple value drivers behind it. On the one hand, from a management standpoint, it makes things easier to understand, "Where's the organization at? What are our priorities? How do we pivot on demand?" It brings a lot more visibility to leadership inside of an organization, but it has the additional benefit of really changing the way that the organization is able to engage its constituents, or its employees. And when we think about that experience, we're really unifying the service quality that everyone that interacts with our organization is used to experiencing.

Matt

We're making inter-agency communications or collaboration easier, as more and more organizations adopt a common ESM framework, which incidentally is here to stay. This is not a fad. This is absolutely the trajectory of all organizations, both public and private. It makes it easier for organizations to ultimately work together. It makes delivery faster, and it makes for a more positive experience overall. Beyond that, we also have its impact on the overall employee experience, which is to say that when you take all those back office capabilities and services that an organization delivers, and you translate them into a consistent methodology across everybody's experience, when you think about how an organization needs to be able to engage with its individual employees, what ESM allows for across its deployment is a consistent mechanism for employee engagement regardless of what service they need from the organization. So ultimately now, we've really accomplished two things for the employee by delivering ESM to the organization.

Matt

On the one hand, we're able to give them a singular and understandable path to resolution of whatever problem they have inside the organization, or whatever service they need. But additionally, we're also reducing the time on task to get problems met. By streamlining and unifying all services, whatever barrier to completing their work an employee has in their way, we're seeing that within all ESM deployments, we're reducing the delay time for productivity for an employee, because all those incidents are able to be resolved faster. They're able to be logged and coordinated between collaborating parts of the organization for resolution much more quickly. So the overall productivity of the organization does actually increase, and I'll allow Jim to talk to us a little bit about specifically how we start to see some of those values.

Jim Wootten

Thank you, Matt. And as Matt said, this view right here is our value proposition for the ESM, whether it's IT, whether it's an employer request, whether it's an HR case that comes in, the quicker, as you see, I'm going left to right, the quicker you answer the call, whether it's the first contact, the first resolution, the cheaper it is. As that goes up the value stream, goes to our service desk, is unable to answer that, and it moves into the higher cost resource, the higher that resolution time, and that also costs the additional labor, whether, again, whether it's an IT request, or an HR request. But our value at CAI, we try to push everything to the left, what we call Shift Left, and answer that at the first contact, the first resolution, and then move along that process. Now, that doesn't mean just answering it first. It could be automating those password resets, getting those instead of answering them. How can we automate that service, and get a quicker resolution time? Hence making it cheaper to for that ticket, and reduce those incidents.

Jim

Moving along to our Customer Value Return Roadmap. As we indicated in the previous slide, the Shift Left mentality of answering the first contact, the first resolution is extremely critical. In this depiction, we had started with 3,000 contacts. Our goal is not only to reduce those contacts, but increase our customer satisfaction. In the beginning, you can see the satisfaction is 85%. By implementing across different various quarters things that help self-service options such as chat, knowledge build out, where the user or the client can answer their question themselves without having to create a contact, over time, that's when you implement those repeatable workflow tasks, and intelligent automation fully automating that workflow, and the approvals from open to close, and reducing that rate. And as you see in this, went from 85% to 97% customer satisfaction. That is the target of ESM, whether it's HR or IT.

Jim

Moving along to our Maturity Model, we often walk into organizations with this roadmap, ask them, "Where do you stand?" And usually, as we see this, they're sitting somewhere in zero or one, because they're seeking additional assistance where things might not be documented. So that's creating higher call volumes or contacts to come in. Reactive, there's not a problem management that's instituted, but as you go up that value chain, being proactive, and being able to predict, when you are able to predict, or understand those root causes, you're able to automate.

Jim

And as you automate, you can move into more guaranteed SLAs. And then as you refine that process, now expand that across the organization, across the enterprise into such things as HR, finance, and then you'll get the full value system of an enterprise service management.

Matt

Yeah. I'd be happy to. And I think it's appropriate when we think about RPA, Chat, Integrations, these are all really automation levers that we're able to pull on in an ESM engagement to drive value. So if I take a 1/2 step back, and think about the service management platform that Jim was just describing, that's a necessary first step in order to be able to unify all the processes, and their workflows, and how they're captured and understood across the organization, and also how any other an automation technology can access the tools that it would need in order to get that work done. The more consistent and unified that behind the scenes capability is, the cheaper and easier it can ultimately be to deploy an automation, and consequently, the more reliable that automation can be. But when we think about what automation means in this context, it's not necessarily in most ESM organizations, it's not about just all of a sudden I'm going to have a robot do all the work for me.

Matt

That's not really reality regardless of what you might hear in the news. The reality is for most organizations, prior to an ESM model, Jim mentioned that early stage, it's often very chaotic. There's a lot of different ways that things are getting done. It's not to say that nothing is being accomplished. It's really simply to say that the efficiencies aren't necessarily there for the organization yet. So getting any specific piece of work done is a little bit harder to ultimately do. What the automation technologies allow is that now we can take work that might typically be done by an on shift resource working during a typical workday. We can now do that work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and that capability alone, by stretching that out to around the clock service, that allows us to meet anybody in the organization where they're at. When they're having that problem, we can get them closer to a resolution more quickly, which again speaks to the overall productivity of the org.

Matt

When we think about some of the other tools and technologies that are in play here, like an AI chat capability, we're not talking about the chat that some of you may have experienced a couple of years ago where you had to follow a very, very explicit script. It was basically just a robot asking you a lot of yes, no questions, and you needed to know a lot about the specific language that the IT organization, or the HR organization, or the finance organization was using in order to describe the thing that you needed. The new modern chat capabilities really elevate that overall experience into very natural conversational language. So if I look at CAI, like I mentioned at the onset, we as a company, as an enterprise, we're deploying all the services that Jim's organization delivers that we're talking about today today. So an intelligent chat capability has been rolled out at CAI for a little while now.

Matt

What it allows a user to do is engage that chatbot, and basically just describe their problem however they want to, in any of several dozen languages if they should need to, and the tool can interpret their intention very, very successfully. As an example, I could come into the chatbot, and I could say, "I hate my laptop." I'm not actually describing a problem. I'm expressing what it correctly interprets as frustration, and it takes me down a path to say, "All right. If there's a problem with your laptop, let's explore some troubleshooting options for you. I can ask a couple questions around that. I can even diagnose," and by I, I mean the chatbot. I'm speaking on its behalf. "I can diagnose that your machine has a significant problem, and should be replaced, and start the workflow for that replacement automatically."

Matt

All those things, when they are delivered, approved, and managed in a very consistent way in that core service management platform, now we can move a lot of that delivery capability out to the periphery of the technology stack, and give a lot of the both employees, and the end users, customers, constituents that we work with more ways to engage with us, more ways to ask questions, and therefore more and better ways to get to resolutions faster. And all of that ultimately translates to an overall reduction in what we might think of as the lower value work to the organization, and it frees up a lot of those resources to do more diagnostic higher value work.

Matt

Deploying a lot of these technologies really allows for them to take on the entire waterfront of work that they're responsible for, and once that starts to happen, then we can really start thinking about how do we actually measure the overall improvement, and the success of the organization, with respect to customer experience.

Jim

Thanks, Matt. I'm going to dive in here to seven key KPIs that we see with our customers to create that ultimate customer experience. These things we will go in, and measure, and then tweak those until you see that reduction of contacts, the customer satisfaction going up. But that cost per ticket, as we said in the Shift Left slide, the earlier on that we can get that question answered, the resolution, the request that's been submitted, get that answered, the cheaper it would be for the enterprise, as well as they go hand in hand with the customer satisfaction, making sure that the customers are receiving that satisfaction's going up, not down. And then part of these to get that customer satisfaction to go up is the first level resolution. Answering it right away, these things make customers happy. First contact, the first time I reached out for an HR item, or a request, or an incident, I was able to resolve it.

Jim

The meantime is resolved. Is that open to close? How long did it take? Hopefully over time, you see a decrease in that. With that integrated, some of the intelligent automation that Matt was referring to is able. How do you automate that resolution? One of the processes there was the integration of CMDB. If that is integrated across the institute, when a ticket comes in, whether that ticket is let's say a blade on a server failed, where is that all connected to, but understanding that's that integrated configuration management database. But employing a tool like ServiceNow, or a different incident platform, that is able to automate that workflow. Then the intelligent automation is able to reach into that, and then resolve it hopefully, automatically, with limited touch. And then moving on to the employee, and the employer, are we answering enough calls? Are we utilizing our employees in the right way, which go hand in hand with employee job satisfaction.

Jim

Being happy, it's not all about just the customer entering the ticket, but it's making sure that the folks are not inundated with tickets. That will increase your customer satisfaction, and your employee satisfaction.

Matt

We're talking about a methodological transformation. ESM really does alter the way that organizations operate in the way that they engage with employees, constituents, collaborators, consumers. It does not however mean that it changes the nature of the work that you do, right? So I know that in a lot of cases we worry a little bit about how does a new transformative technology or capability coming into the organization change everybody's life, and in the case of ESM, it's not really changing jobs that people need to do. It's making the execution of that work much more easier, and much more efficient. What we found is that as even for our own purposes, as we rolled out our own ESM capability within the organization, we weren't just getting additional value out of ESM in the context of the tickets, or the requests that we get today, and that we got yesterday are now being done more efficiently, more effectively.

Matt

While that's all true, we're also finding areas of unmet demand, questions that people had in the organization that weren't necessarily being asked, because they didn't know how to ask it in the first place. Collaboration between departments or agencies, that wasn't previously working as well as it could have, because they were essentially speaking nearly different languages, and operating from fundamentally different systems. ESM is a mechanism to address all those shortcomings or challenges inside of an organization, and how they operate. What it allows all of us organizationally, is visibility into how we're getting work done, to let end-to-end across the business, or across the agency processes run more efficiently, right? It's often the case that we have a workflow in human resources that works very well for HR, but is ultimately not tailored as well as it could be for the technology platform being deployed to support that workflow.

Matt

And with ESM, as we're watching all of these requests, and all the demand that needs to be met from everyone that the organization is engaged with, tracked uniformly, it lets us see that, all right, there are simple and small changes behind the scenes that can be made to make collaboration and cooperation easier, that can make workflows more seamless, and easier to operate. ESM brings all that to the front, and keeps pointing any organization toward an easy path toward continuous improvement for the way that the organization operates. It's been hugely valuable for us. It's been very valuable for many of our customers, and I'm hopeful that today we've impressed upon you that ESM could be a very high-value opportunity for your organization as well.

Matt

If that's the case, and you're interested in moving forward, Jim described a couple of the next steps.