Modern businesses run on services, both for internal and external users. HR, for example, enables employees to select healthcare and retirement plans, take parental leave, and enroll in direct deposit –to name a few. On the other hand, customer support allows customers to change their passwords, change billing plans, and troubleshoot product issues.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Each line-of-business (LOB) unit within an enterprise must maintain, manage, and deliver a dizzying and ever-growing array of services. This highly complex endeavor challenges the balance between efficiency and quality. But success is critical, as failure can result in damaged employee morale, reduced customer satisfaction, loss of revenue, and even penalties for non-compliance with regulations.
The bar is high because end-users —customers, employees, and even partners — have high expectations for service quality. We’ve all grown accustomed to exceptional services from the best consumer brands. Netflix and Spotify know our content preferences, and Google Maps can guide us to a restaurant without ever providing an address.
Manual processes will never attain the quality that end-users have come to expect: an immediate response, a single point of accountability, a clear solution, and access from any device they choose. What’s more, markets move fast, which means that LOBs need the ability to modify existing services and create new ones rapidly. Manual methods of deploying, managing, and delivering services are too slow and inefficient to keep up with the pace of change.
Enterprise Service Management (ESM) provides the intelligence and automation organizations need to deliver a consistently high level of service. ESM has its roots within IT, which initially grappled with the nearly overwhelming challenge of managing myriad – often competing – priorities on the fly. IT Service Management (ITSM) emerged to address these challenges. The lessons and solutions that ITSM provided have been applied and adapted to address similar service challenges across nearly all LOBs.
An ideal ESM solution will provide the following critical capabilities:
- An expandable, open platform: ESM must automate and integrate with the existing services and other assets to deliver actionable insights, efficiency, and quality with the ability to converge IT and non-IT lines of business, collaborative work management, DevOps processes, data, and work.
- Integrated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML): ESM must leverage AI/ML to understand context, enable intelligent self-service, and assist users to address more complex issues quickly, reducing costs and long lead times.
- Intelligent Automation: ESM must be able to automate data and processes in an intelligent, predictive way across apps, technology environments, and workflows.
- Unified, agile DevOps tooling: ESM must integrate legacy and modern systems of record with agile tooling to enable rapid iteration and increase the flexibility of service creation and management with reduced change management risk.
BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management provides all these capabilities and more. Another unique benefit of BMC Helix lies in enabling personalized user experiences with drag-and-drop tools that make it simple to build custom page designs and user journeys. It leverages AI/ML to automate repetitive, manual tasks intelligently and provides a single interface to manage across domains, assets, applications, and data. And with integrated BMC Helix for ServiceOps, organizations can also realize cross-platform economies of scale, predict problems before they occur, and identify potential incidents in advance.
