Enterprise Service Management For Large Enterprises

The term “Enterprise Service Management” has been around for longer than some of us can remember, evolving from being used in transportation, legal, or governmental services to being formalised in ITIL in 1980s, to its today’s form, to rationalise and streamline the delivery of all services organisation offers to its end user audiences – such as external customers or employees. The intent of the article is to showcase some of the most likely challenges you are going to encounter on your journey towards the “ESM Utopia”.  

Regularly speaking to our base of tens of thousands of customers, we found that these challenges experienced in IT and Enterprise Service Management correlate most significantly depending on the size of the company, whilst its pace of growth, sector, profitability, location, and length of existence play a significant role we will point out where relevant. To clarify, when talking about small organisations, we mean up to 500 employees, medium-sized – around 2,500 employees, and large enterprises - with 5,000 employees and above. 

Adopting advanced technology 

The larger the organisation, the more “baggage” it tends to carry with it, built up over the years of natural growth, acquisitions, takeovers, different management, changing transformational technology strategies, and staff churn. These changes help organisations to remain relevant and competitive in the market. However, a counterforce is required for the organisation to be continuously revenue-generating and remain profitable at the same time, leading to natural resistance to change across processes, culture, as well as new technology adoption. Typically, large enterprises struggle to get an organisation-wide buy-in to the change, upskill employees, adjust processes and workflows, and replace or integrate with existing technology. 

Such transformation may seem too slow and lead to disillusionment or a loss of faith in its success. It’s not uncommon for words such as “DevOps”, “Agile”, or “Digital Transformation” to become highly unpopular among staff, should they not see the value benefits for themselves early enough. However, shock denial, frustration, and depression are natural stages for any human adapting to any change, as outlined in the Kubler-Ross Change Curve (itSMF, 2023). 

This is no different in driving change in Service Management, particularly because any change has a direct impact on the agents (e.g. new platform’s UI and intra and inter-departmental processes) as well as on the employees (e.g. new ways of accessing services such as via virtual agent), and thus needs to be carefully planned, affected audiences consulted, and processes reviewed. After all, we often see organisations taking existing processes and applying them unchanged to the new technology, diminishing the benefits of the new platform and sometimes indefinitely delaying the return on investment.  

The situation is the same with AI adoption. Despite 92% of CIOs believing that AI will be implemented in their organisation by 2025, 49% report that their organizations struggle to estimate and demonstrate the value of AI (Gartner, 2024).  

While most professional service providers offer AI Readiness Assessments in various formats, only some can provide a multi-year AI adoption roadmap that clearly shows typical costs and expected ROI due to the complexity of dependencies but also a lack of data and practical experience to back the numbers up.  

Disparate platforms 

Many technologists are tired of hearing phrases such as “single source of truth” as they understand that despite what the vendors would like them to think, there is no silver bullet to Enterprise Service Management. In reality, the successful integration of multiple key business platforms and dedicated point solutions will enable them to access the best-of-breed functionality and decrease their dependency on a single vendor and their yearly price increases, providing a more beneficial platform for future negotiations. On the other hand, even with the best platform consolidation program in place, large enterprises need to be prepared to have strong vendor management capabilities and be able to negotiate favourable terms whilst not delaying access to new technologies significantly in the fast-changing market conditions. This is the main reason many turn to outsourcing vendor management to reseller organisations to reduce their vendor management costs and speed up their access to technology adoption and time to value.  

Compliance and security 

As Deloitte pointed out in their whitepaper, organisations have multiple systems of record across many business functions, making it hard for them to manage their data quality and security centrally. For too long, the leaders have focused on improving their ability to react to security breaches instead of using the Shift Left approach to prevent security incidents from happening altogether. In contrast to how it’s been marketed by traditional security vendors, it is time for us to “do less cybersecurity (and) do more business securely,” as pointed out by Greg Van Der Gaast on the CDW blog.  

As part of the adoption of this approach, Service Management leaders need to adjust their narrow focus to thinking holistically and collaborate with security leaders, rather than ending up in a “us versus them” situation that we typically see, as each leader fights for their own budgets and agenda, leading to further strategy, process, and technology silos, and therefore increasing non-compliance and security risks. Some of those were outlined in Mark Temple’s blog citing close to 92% of higher education respondents to the government’s cyber security report experiencing at least one successful cyber-attack in 12 months (Gov.uk, 2022). Globally, cybercrime is responsible for $6 trillion USD in damages (Gartner, 2024).  

Managing remote and hybrid workforces 

If the events of 2020 and the years following have taught us anything, it is that whilst collaboration is key, employees in certain roles can be just as productive, if not more, working remotely than in the office. With 5% of workers working exclusively from home, going up to 38% in less than six months in H1 2020 (UK Parliament, 2022), employees have seen improvements in their well-being and work-life balance, and whilst employers have not seen a significant decrease in productivity, they struggled to manage their remote teams effectively. Whilst 73% of employees say they need a better reason to go into the office than just company expectations, 85% of leaders say the shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive (Microsoft, 2022). The service management teams are expected to continue providing increasingly better support for remote workers and productivity metrics. 

Handling increasing customer expectations 

The large cultural change mentioned in Managing remote and hybrid workforces, has also happened in our private lives. Whist brick-and-mortar retail businesses struggled to survive, as seen in the insolvencies of the likes of HMV, Debenhams, Wilko, Ted Baker, Carpetright, the Body Shop, Arcadia Group, Victoria Secrets, Oak Furnitureland, Monsoon, Accessorise, Aldo, Oliver Sweeney, Laura Ashley, Peacocks, Jaeger, Quiz, or TM Lewin, to name just a few in the UK, retail businesses with well-developed e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Ocado, ASOS, Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, or Next have seen their online profits triple in some cases (The New York Times, 2021). 

Suddenly, high street customers were forced to experience the amount of time saved by having their food, clothes, or household appliances easily shortlisted, peer-reviewed, delivered, supported, and even returned with no questions asked, via user-friendly UI’s, automated workflows, and using AI-powered algorithms to suggest further relevant goods. Indeed, with restrictions lifted, many shoppers returned to the high street, especially where the online experience and convenience did not surpass the in-store. However, shoppers often use shops to try and feel goods out before purchasing them from the comfort of their home at the best online price available. 

If they receive this level of convenience in their personal lives, why not in the workplace? Especially with Gen-Z, who only entered the office in the third decade of the 21st century, whose tolerance of the lack of seamless self-service experience is minimal, leading to frustration and putting organisations at risk of talent loss, as described in this LinkedIn article (Jaro Tomik, 2024).  

The struggle against automating complex workflows continues to challenge organisations of all sizes. A particularly good indicator of maturity is Joiners-Movers-Leavers workflow optimisation, spanning across multiple departments, business units, and complex processes, to support end users in various global locations, delivering against multiple types of user requirements, or levels of technology skills.  

The number of actionable notifications from alert and monitoring solutions, (un)scheduled changes, user-reported incidents and requests, in combination with staffing issues, have put the majority of Service Departments on the back foot, flooding agents with reactive work, rendering it (near) impossible to proactively focus on improvement identification and action as part of their Problem Management or end-user experience improvement initiatives. If these challenges prevail, employees will see little to no improvement in their frustration levels stemming from the delta between personal life and work-life service experience delivery. In contrast, organisations that will nail this transition will see significantly higher employee satisfaction and talent retention rates.  

Balancing cost-effectiveness with quality service 

From a business point of view, service departments have a reputation for being “invisible” if everything works, and they are the obvious place to investigate when they don’t. This view makes it difficult to justify increased budgets for proactive projects or additional resources, whether the perception of the quality of service delivery is positive (“If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”) or negative (“What difference will it make to our bottom line?”). Over the last decades, whilst businesses have understood the importance of investing millions of pounds into IT infrastructure and Security, most enterprises have only recently caught up with the idea that shifting a fraction of those budgets into Service Management will bring them significant and visible business value, positively affecting everyone in the organisation from the CEO to a Service Desk Analyst.  

Whether we look at Retail, Manufacturing, Central Government, or Healthcare, the budgetary focus has traditionally sat outside of investing in internal service delivery improvements, forcing teams to prioritise short-term investments under the banner of “do more with less” year after year for decades.  

In some organisations, this has led to the increased adoption of trends such as Hyperautomation, while in others, as many as 89% of their employees experience burnout, leading to high employee churn (Employee Burnout, Part 1: The 5 Main Causes (gallup.com) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/debunking-myth-why-doing-more-less-recipe-burnout-leon-rawitz/). Amid the global war on talent, organisations need to invest in the way they interact with their employees, prioritising different return on investment metrics, such as increased employee retention and reduction of stress and burnout in the workplace, as part of their investment into Service Management initiatives. Currently, the majority of enterprises have little to no meaningful interaction with their end users. Even if they gather quantitative and qualitative data through surveys, they struggle to process the data and action it, and very rarely do the positive changes get communicated well back to the end users. This makes them feel they are not listened to, and the time spent on filling out surveys has been wasted, discouraging them from providing any more feedback in the future unless they fit into the less than 10% of extremely satisfied or dissatisfied service recipients.  

Capturing the average experience to enable data-driven improvement prioritisation is why more mature Service Management practices turn to solutions such as Nexthink and HappySignals. Their implementation enables driving of the right levels of process, governance, best practice, and automation in service quality feedback data gathering, processing, actioning, and improvement in communication, leading to the augmentation of the perception of the departments as proactively driving internal service transformation, rather than focusing purely on reactive break-fix.  

Data inconsistency and integration 

With each new piece of the technology puzzle introduced into an organisation, the requirements to run it increase (skills, time, management), and those that are not strategically integrated into the technological ecosystem create yet another data silo. With the promise of AI, Machine Learning, and Automation coming into the workplace to make our lives easier, organisations are still struggling with the core problem of data integration, classification, deduplication, trust (data age, manual entry errors), accessibility, and searchability (What are Data Silos and What Problems Do They Cause?|Definition from TechTarget, 2024).  

Therefore, we are experiencing not just an AI adoption skills problem but primarily a data integration and classification problem. With 55% of organisations having already adopted AI (McKinsey, 2023), the return on investment is often difficult to quantify or even reach. The main culprit is AI’s access to trusted, classified data sources. Without a quality data source, organisations experience the dreaded “garbage in – garbage out” situation. 

In Service Management, the quality of data is directly linked to the quality of service. Employees and agents equipped with accessible, high-quality knowledge resolve issues and requests much faster. However, despite Knowledge Management being well-defined for over four decades, the reliance on manual agent input to create and update the knowledge articles has led to varied quality, structure, and trustworthiness, even if the time has been spent on their creation. Will AI solve this challenge? Only the future will tell - and we will provide some hints later in this report. 😊 

Another challenge with data quality uncovered by Vanson Bourne is that, on average, 55% of employees admit they report only around half of their technology issues to the IT department. This would mean that in an organisation of 10,000 employees, the estimated yearly productivity time loss of 50 hours due to technology issues, equating to about $25m USD, could be even higher (Nexthink, 2020). 

Service variability and scalability  

Have you ever felt like you were treated as just a number by your organisation despite clearly having specific requirements based on your role, location, skillset, or disability? It is common for organisations to lack profiling or, as my colleague Tim Russell regularly speaks about, Measuring and Improving Employee Experience and supporting Hybrid Work. Whether the end user is office or home-based, travels, or requires high-end processing power, they often get the same device, compromising their productivity and leading to frustration. Whilst the introduction of the concept of BYOD (bring your own device) is welcomed by the CFOs and CHROs, it typically scares the life out of Security department due to the zero-trust policy and the Operations and Service Delivery departments due to the pressure stemming from the end-users expecting them to be able to support any devices. On the other hand, the progress in Embedded AI in devices will enable a faster and easier route to employee productivity in many cases, reducing dependency on the organisation’s hardware’s computational power for AI processing (Gartner, 2024) 

If our true purpose as an Enterprise Service Management organisation is to enable productivity through service availability and improvement while reducing any security risks and frustrations in the process to a minimum, a shift towards a more human-centric design is necessary, as outlined in the Ticket Volume podcast with Alan Nance. Once we understand the user profiles and their preferred journeys, we can deliver the right level of experience and minimal risk to the enterprise.  

In the last part of this series, we will have a look at the challenges more likely experienced by medium and small enterprises. If you are experiencing any of the challenges, it may be the best time for you to reach out to your CDW Account Manager to learn about how we can ensure you know what your peers and competitors are doing, helping you gain the reassurance of being on the best path possible for your organisation.